vault of heaven
by PreludeInZ
Summary: Heavenward is a story about John and EOS. vault of heaven is a story about John before EOS. Being twenty-seven thousand words and nine years' worth of flashbacks and hopefully sufficient explanation as to the goings-on in Heavenward. This is the sixth part of Heavenward. It follows optimal pathfinding algorithms. Art via artsekey dot tumblr dot com.
1. prologue

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.

Strictly speaking, as to the facts of this matter, opinions differ. At least slightly.

But the Bible still speaks to Abrahamic concept of the firmament, wrought to divide the waters above from the water below. The heavens made separate from the seas and the seas made separate from the land beyond the water.

Above the humility of the earth arcs the Vault of Heaven, the celestial dome onto which the stars are fastened, to shine on humanity below. The stars were so fastened as to order the seasons, to mark the days and the years, and to be signs for all creation.

The Earth is four and a half billion years old. At the very apex of this ripe old age, humanity began to hang its own stars, to arc across the sky, to weave and cross and wend through the lowest of the heavens, and sing the song of a new creation; sound and light and song and story radiating outward; Frank Sinatra serenading the depths of the cosmos, the beautiful and perfect mundanity of humankind.

Regardless of the theological foundation upon which "Strangers In The Night" and Ol' Blue Eyes have their footing, there are stars and there are _stars_. The former, man-made and artificial, hung by fallible hands, are by far the more dangerous.


	2. unilateral disarmament of lowearth orbit

**\- 2052 -**

It's a quirk of Hugh's that he refuses to meet in any building taller than a single storey.

Consultation with one of the premier members of European intelligence is worth the accommodation, though it's something of a challenge to find an appropriate single storey building in Manhattan. Still, Jeff's managed to turn up a gorgeous little diner, the sort that he's sorry he hasn't found sooner. It's a relic of century old art deco, beautifully kept up, all stainless steel, black and white enamel, and strong, clean lines.

The menu's is probably a little low-brow for Lord Creighton-Ward's tastes, but a burger and fries never did anyone without a heart condition any harm, in Jeff Tracy's opinion.

Anyway, Hugh's only ordered a cup of tea.

After the manner of the American government as concerns visiting diplomats, Jeff's own bodyguard is pulling double-duty, and Hugh's sent his own man on with his daughter, down to Boston for the day. Kyrano's at the next table over with a cup of black coffee and a full view of the rest of the diner and it's late morning patrons, while Jeff eases his way towards making a proposition.

They're still in the shallow waters of polite smalltalk and Jeff's mentally reviewing the usual checklist. Weather's been remarked upon. They have no sports in common. If this were a social engagement and not a business meeting, work would get a passing mention, but instead the next conversational marker is meant to be family.

"How's Penelope finding Oxford?"

Lord Hugh smiles ever so slightly and for the first time there's a warm light in his pale grey eyes. "Considerably less agreeable than Oxford is finding Penelope, by all accounts. Her marks are more than satisfactory, but she carries on to an unflattering length about the stodginess of it all." Social equilibrium demands an equal and opposite response and after a swallow of tea, Hugh questions, "And John? I believe at one point you'd mentioned he was pursuing a dual doctorate."

Hugh might just sound impressed by the fact, and as well he should be. Jeff nods, smiles, and there's a brief puff of pride in his chest, "Computer Science and Astrophysics."

"Congratulations to him."

"He had to talk me into letting him do both at the same time. By now I thought he'd have settled down a little bit, but, no, still just as excited as the day he enrolled." Jeff chuckles, "If Penelope feels the need to slap him by the end of today, I won't fault her for it."

"I imagine Parker would intervene before it came to that."

It's not clear if Hugh's missed the joke or just chosen to ignore it. There was a point in time when Jeff would have considered the former to be a stark impossibility, but then in the time since that's been true, Hugh's become the sort of person who refuses to meet in buildings taller than a single story.

Beside Hugh's white teacup is a little stainless steel pot of hot water, plain black tea steeping stronger and stronger. It somehow seems as though it sets a time limit on the conversation, a pot of tea slowly growing cold and bitter, that it'll soon be undrinkable, an untenable waste, if Jeff doesn't get to his point sooner than later.

So he clears his throat and goes straight into it, the reason for this one-storey meeting. "I've been approached by the GDF. They're looking to contract a private entity to help develop solutions to some of the problems presented by global peacekeeping. I've told them I'll consider it, because I'd hoped for some of your input, first and foremost."

Jeff's brought a dossier of information regarding the project in question, and Kyrano turns up at his elbow, hands it over to the Lord Creighton-Ward, who accepts it with a brief glance at the cover of the file.

As the other man begins to page through the dossier, Jeff tucks into a BLT, though the B's been swapped for slices of avocado. His fiftieth birthday had been an occasion on which he'd been told to have an eye on his sodium intake, and the warning still has enough of an edge that he still occasionally remembers to hold to it. He watches Hugh as he reads, his eyes drifting quickly down each page, turning several sections forward, then doubling back, rereading.

"It's ambitious," the Englishman concludes, as he snaps the folder closed and sets it back on the table, pins it there with his fingertips. For the first time since their informal meeting had begun, Hugh looks up with something like interest, fixes Jeff with a pointed stare, "Are you the first person they've approached?"

"I think I'm fixed to be the _only_ person they approach. It's a very specific sort of idea they've got in mind. I imagine it's a proposal that's been in bureaucratic hell since the end of the war—taking it to an external contractor might be the only hope they have of actually getting it accomplished."

They're both still talking sideways about the project, it's too early for the details. Hugh will have read between the lines, will have picked up on the sorts of things that cause a man like Jeff Tracy to hesitate, to opt for caution. "I suppose it would do an immense amount of good, if it could be done."

Jeff shrugs. "The way I see it, it would be more like undoing a great deal of harm."

"Do you think it's possible?"

"I think from a technological standpoint, it'll take a few years of R&D to devise a workable solution, and then a further few years to actually implement, but that's never something I've considered an obstacle."

"You're worried about the politics."

"We're talking about a literal minefield. I'm more than a little worried about the politics."

Hugh has long, aristocratic fingers and manicured nails. The pair of them are both widowers, a sad fact to have in common. Jeff's moved his wedding band to his right hand. Hugh's remains fixed on the left. He still pins the dossier to the table, though it makes the tremor in his hand that much more obvious. "Demining is a noble goal. God knows orbital shipping lanes are fraught with ordnance. Every year there's a call for an innovative solution. Frankly I'm surprised you haven't stepped up before."

Jeff coughs. "Generally it's done with the consent of sovereign nations. I'm not sure that's going to be the case, here. It's a GDF initiative. Those can be—dubiously sanctioned."

"Mm."

Jeff clears his throat and glances to Kyrano. He nods back. His head of security has taken a visual inventory of the other patrons and though it's still early days and unlikely that anyone's listening in, but it can't hurt to be too careful. Jeff's voice remains low as he continues, "—and I think they might be leading up to something—broader. I want at least an educated guess as to what's on the other side of the fence, before I go sticking my hands through the gaps."

This statement is what flattens Hugh's palm onto the top of the dossier, has him pull it across the table and take it in hand. There are lines to be read between, conclusions to be drawn. Hugh's retired, but his contacts in the GDF are still far more robust than Jeff's are, even now. "I'll look into it."

If what's been proposed is possible, it's likely to be one of the single broadest strokes of humanitarian effort ever achieved. The unilateral disarmament of low-earth orbit in the wake of a war of proliferation is an achievement on par with the global distribution of the vaccine for malaria.

Jeff's not even sixty, yet. It'd be a hell of a thing to be the man who did both.

* * *

"Don't you ever get lonely out there, John?"

Alan's a prototype, sitting at the end of John's bed, fuzzy and blue and still in his rocket ship pajamas, off on the other side of the world. It had been a gift from Dad, brand new tech holographic tech he's been given, to trial before committing to for his latest project. Alan's got the other one, the other disc shaped holocomm, with the words LightType in raised white print on the rim. There's a bowl of neon blue milk on the floor in front of him, and it'd be blue even in person, because Alan's apparently capable of fueling a meaningful existence on a diet that consists of corn syrup and food dye, mushed up in soy milk.

It's the Island's morning. It's John's should-be-dinnertime-but-just-have-to-finish-this-paper. He's hit a stalling point, a tricky run of paragraphs that he just _wrote_ , tapped out quickly and easily and without deep or serious thought. This is a trap he falls into a little too often—fingers that type at rate of a hundred and four words a minute and are connected to a brain like _his_ sometimes get a little too enthusiastic.

So there's maybe three hundred words that got skittered onto the page without actual due thought, because the subject matter is rich, he's well-informed in it, and his opinions have gone and bled into his facts. A quick burst of keystrokes like gunfire across his mechanical keyboard, and these are gone, ruthlessly excised, until he's ready to pay proper attention. John rubs his eyes. Needs to break the rhythm and double back to it with a fresh line of thought.

Good a time as any to pay attention to Alan, who's been waiting patiently for his answer. "Did Grandma tell you to ask?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Nnnnooo. Nope." Alan's eleven and tiny and he kicks his feet when he's lying. Alan's still a little too young to be tremendously concerned about the fact that he's still tiny, and isn't aware that his three oldest siblings have a pool between them about whether or not he's going to shoot straight up, like John and Scott, or broaden out across the shoulders like Virgil, Gordon and Dad. Lying on his stomach on the floor, with his chin in his hands and his attention divided between John's comm and whatever Saturday morning nonsense he's into lately, his bare feet are crossed at the ankles, and still. "Just wondered."

Not actually that far out of the realm of possibility, that this is the sort of thing that Alan would've just wondered. There's an improbable streak of protectiveness that runs through the baby of the family, something that seems to have started to crop up right around the time his brothers started making themselves absent. Scotty off in the air force, John, straight to MIT, practically still in his cap and gown from high school. Virg, looking at apartments in Denver. Gordon, and his apparent decision to try and grow gills by sheer force of will, even if he has to live in the pool to make it happen. John folds up his laptop, reaches out to pull the little hologram display into his lap. "Are you worried about me?" he asks, instead of answering.

"Kinda."

Good ol' Alan. John grins at him. "Well, but I'm okay, though. Right, bud?"

"Mmyeah. You say so." Alan rubs at his freckled nose, and reaches over to pause whatever he's watching. Must _really_ be concerned. He rests his chin back on his hands and squints at his older brother. "Really, though?"

"Yeah. Hey, you know what, I even made a friend today. Brings my total up to like, four."

"Grandma says brothers don't count, 'cuz brothers have to be friends."

That's the sort of thing that Grandma would say. John disagrees, but privately, where Grandma can't argue with him about it. "Two and a half, then."

Alan's brow furrows mentally doing the math and trying to figure out just who that number comprises. "Who?"

"Dad had a meeting with her father at the Manhattan office, her name's Penelope. Uh, Lady Creighton-Ward, I guess, technically. I don't know, all that English nobility stuff is hard to sort out. She was nice. I have her email. We walked around the campus all day, showed her all the good labs, introduced her to some of my profs." The day's a bit of a blur, actually. If social energy can be considered a currency, it's possible John's gotten a little overdrawn, what with a whole day in the company of someone who'd started out a stranger.

The highlight of the day (and the point at which John had realized he'd actually made a friend) had been a two hour period spent sitting on a bench in the middle of the quad, talking about the piece of modern art crossed with high-encryption server tech that made up the centerpiece. It's a shifting, mutable piece of kinetic sculpture, covered in tiny LCD tiles, an impossibly complex and ever changing monument to code and cryptography, programming languages and pure math. John had pulled out a tablet and showed her how to log on to the thing, and the ways that the various elements and interfaces could be altered and interacted with. He'd pulled up video of the way the installation had suddenly turned a bright, alarming shade of red on 10/24/2048 and pulsed out a ciphered message in Morse code. He spares Alan a complete recap and just says, "We talked about cryptography for like two hours over lunch, that was pretty cool."

"That's good. Are you gonna email her?"

Probably not, but it's possible. "Sure, maybe."

"You should email her, if you're gonna be friends. What's she like?"

One of these days John's going to sit Alan down and really explain what the deal is with introverts, and how sometimes people can learn to enjoy their own company, and how much more room there is in the day when one doesn't feel the need to fill that time with other people. "She's nice. Virgil's age. She's going to school in England, Oxford. Umm. She had a bodyguard."

Alan's eyes widen, as though their father doesn't have his own bodyguard, and for the moment he's far more interested in bodyguards than he is in nice girls. "Really? Were they _cool_?"

John chuckles. "I guess he was, yeah. Older guy. Umm, maybe a couple years older than Dad. His name was Parker."

"Did he have an earpiece thing? Did he have a bulletproof vest? Did he frisk you? Did he have a _gun_?"

"Yes, couldn't tell, no, and probably not, concealed carry is illegal in Massachusetts."

"Aw."

John rolls his eyes, but fondly. "Yeah, I was real disappointed. Didn't even tackle me when I went to shake hands. Was kind of hoping to be tasered."

Alan rolls his eyes and scoffs, but with a grin of his own. It's only recently that Alan's really started to _get_ John's jokes, subtler than Gordon's, funnier than Dad's and usually seeded deeply into serious conversations. "Why's she need a bodyguard, you think?"

He hadn't, actually, given it a great deal of thought. "I don't know. Same reasons dad does, I guess."

" _Hmm_."

" _Hmm_ yourself."

There's unconcealed hope in Alan's eyes when he asks, "Is she gonna be your girlfriend?"

Oh, Alan. Though this is actually Scott's fault, for having had a high school girlfriend who Alan had been in absolute adoration of. He hadn't spoken to Scott for a week after he'd broken up with her, about a month before his high school graduation. "Nah, Allie." And then, changing the subject before they can go wandering down _this_ particular well-worn track. "Oh hey, you wanna do me a favour?"

Alan's been pathologically helpful since he was four years old, and this perks him right up, saves him from the abyss of despair that goes along with his latent mourning for Laura Kelvin, who's gone on to be barefoot and pregnant somewhere in Kansas, last John heard. "Yeah."

It's actually why he'd called Alan in the first place, but they'd chattered at each other for a while and then just spent a while sort of half-talking, enjoying each other's telepresence. But really what John had wanted to call about was a fairly simple favour.

"There's an old laptop in my room. I need you to boot it up and find a file for me. I've got this old game program I wrote when I was your age and it's been on my mind lately. Mind helping me out, Al?"

His little brother scrambles onto his knees and mocks a salute. "Sure thing, John. I gotcha covered. What's it called?"

" . Thanks, Allie."


	3. two doctorates and no damn sense

**\- 2053 -**

The Global Conflict doubled the number of man made objects in orbit.

It's one of John's favourite facts to quote, the sort of bizarrely accurate statistic that delights him because it's fundamentally counter-intuitive. That it's nearly a century since Sputnik-1 had first achieved low-earth orbit, and yet the it's the past decade that's seen the launch of over a thousand new satellites, space-faring vessels, space stations, and the creation of the orbital shipping lanes necessary to supply these entities.

John tends to blithely skip over the notion that the bulk of these craft are weaponized, prefers to talk about the leaps and bounds in engineering that had made low earth orbit suddenly achievable on a broad scale. The costs of launching spacecraft were no longer prohibitive to even the smallest, most modest of nation states. Among the things John doesn't talk about is the way said nation states had made their way into what was never formally labeled a war.

The term _Global Conflict_ had initially been mocked and derided by pundits the world over, but ultimately it had been what stuck. Because when is a war not a war? When it's a war without a single casualty. When it's a war so cold it occurs in the airless reaches just beyond the atmosphere. Apparently a war is not a war when it's a bizarre, sanitized state of gradual global armament, not at the hands of government, but by the rapid strides of industry. The doors had opened to a worldwide free-for-all among newly minted arms dealers, launching new satellites or weaponizing extant hardware, making the old new again.

Knowing the numbers is different from seeing it rendered, seeing the globe that hovers above the boardroom's long, dark table, bristling with points of brilliant light. Satellites, space-faring vessels, space stations. Some are white. More than half are red.

A world at peace, trapped in a sphere of war.

Jeff frowns at the display, doesn't look up at the handful of figures, seated around this table. The windows have been darkened, the lights are down as low as they'll go. As think tanks go, this is a small one. Pulled from their usual assignments, thoroughly vetted by Kyrano, Jeff has a quartet of engineers, a pair of lawyers, and another hologram, belonging to Lord Creighton-Ward. This particular meeting is the twelfth of its kind, and if things had gone to plan, would have been the meeting to finalize Tracy Industry's proposed solution to the problem brought to his attention a year ago; internally titled Project Heavenward.

When the man in charge of the room finally speaks, his voice is soft, almost contemplative, "A year ago, I took this project on. A year from _now_ , I'm going to be sending my son up there. Into _that_ hellish goddamn mess." Jeff begins pacing slowly down the length of the table. Jeff's voice gains an edge, "And I refuse to believe that we can't find a workable solution."

There's some uncomfortable shuffling around the table. None of the engineers are going to step up to the plate, so it falls to the lawyers. One elbows the other in the ribs and some intense, lawyerly negotiation takes place between them, before a throat gets cleared of anything that might cause a nervous warble, and the woman speaks, "Mr. Tracy, we've been appointed to take you through the complete legal briefing, but to put it in the broadest terms, it comes down to the question of intent."

"The intent to scour the skies above us until they're clear of humanity's basest and most paranoid impulse since the Cold War?" This is sarcastic, and falsely reductive. Jeff's perfectly aware of what's on the other side of the coin.

The lawyer sticks to her guns, and continues, "There's no way to develop technology like this in a manner that makes the intended usage ambiguous, and the intended usage is a nearly unilateral takeover of low earth orbit. International law is clear on the terms by which unmanned vessels can be commandeered, and to develop a technology for that express purpose—" she trails off and shakes her head. "The company's connections to the GDF have already started to draw negative attention."

There are first world problems, and then there are the problems of the ultra-rich. The tendency of society at large to cast them as megalomaniacal and at the root of all evil in the world is one of the main ones. "The automatic conflation of money, power, and corruption is one I'm trying to _undo_. Surely this is the same problem we faced when we undertook the distribution of A4180? People said I'd engineered a supervirus, never mind the fact that it was sourced directly from the World Health Organization. Is this not just a case of dealing with another class of fear-monger?"

"The risk we'd run to company PR—"

Jeff resists the urge to growl. "Was deemed acceptable then, and is acceptable now. We established the protocols for rapid global distribution of a vaccine that effectively wiped out one of the greatest mortal threats to humankind. I've done my bit against Pestilence; now I want my shot at War."

There's no reasoning with a man who talks in these terms. The lawyers look to the huddled up conclave of engineers. Time to switch up the field.

As far as arguing with the boss goes, the engineers are definitely second string. So there's rather more shuffling of belongings, before one of them pipes up, "Sir, with due respect—we've been at the logistics for a _year_. Our progress reports have reflected the facts of the matter. The stopping point is the fact that none of this equipment is standardized. The sheer range of hardware—of _software_ —that was engineered during the Global Conflict was unprecedented. Half of it has been kept classified by the governments it belongs to. The other half are frankensteined together _monsters_ of tech that are programmed to blow every device with which they're associated if they're ever tampered with. All we've been able to acquire are estimates, there's no readily hard data about what's actually up there. The most responsible proposal would be to take our own survey. There are _twice_ the number of man-made objects in—"

"I'm aware," Jeff interrupts, terse. But the notion snags in his brain, starts to glimmer along a line of reasoning, bright like a vein of silver in the dark, and he seizes hold of the idea and the engineer who's given it to him. "What's your department?"

There's a nervous swallow. "Aeronautics."

Jeff's going to need to throw the entire engineering division the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties, in order to counteract the inevitable spread of rumors that he's a tyrant who plans to takeover the entirety of low earth orbit. There are usually myriad layers of management between him and the various stripes of hard scientist that make up TI's research and development corps. A nice soft cushion of middlemen and women, meant to be the buffer between the head and the heart of the organization. Jeff's aware that he's intimidating. Doesn't especially care. His eyes narrow at the engineer he's singled out.

"You stay. Everyone else is dismissed, and we'll reconvene in a week." In a week he hopes

The room empties. There are sympathetic glances, but no one moves to stay. Hugh's hologram at the far end of the table vanishes without a word. Jeff's left alone with his new best friend, a terrified Aeronautics engineer.

He remains standing, continues to pace the room. He's been reminded of another major project and it's possible there's a commonality to be taken advantage of. "Tell me," he begins, still carefully constructing the thought, "you were diverted away from our more major initiative to consult on Project Heavenward?"

A quick, nervous nod. "Yessir."

"I imagine you've been keeping tabs."

"Everyone is, sir." For the first time since he first entered the room, the engineer brightens, risks a grin. "She's going to be a beautiful machine, Mr. Tracy. The fact that Three's due to hit production is exciting, but at the end of the day, a rocket's a rocket. Five—Five's going to be a _masterpiece_."

Jeff comes to the chair across the table from his tragically diverted engineer. "Let me change the context for you, just slightly," he says, pale blue eyes alight with that glint of newly discovered silver, "and then let's talk about Thunderbird Five."

* * *

Scott's in town for the occasion, the occasion being his brother's twenty-first birthday.

This is secondary to the occasion that has his brother halfway slumped over the bar, arms wrapped around two leather-bound books, one in black and one in blue, one spine lettered in gold and the other lettered in silver. They still smell like printer's ink and slightly plasticky faux leather and John's rested his forehead on the topmost, while his brother meanders his way through his mostly-gone half of the appetizer platter they're supposed to be splitting.

Incongruent to his brother's interests on his brother's birthday, Scott's picked a sports bar, but it's the later part of the middle of the day, and the place is relatively quiet. And it's a classy, high-end sort of sports bar, all white walls and raw wood surfaces, warm light and sleek flatscreen displays. The menu between major service hours is a single card, an exercise in minimalism and striking typography, dictating a short offering of late afternoon specialties before the rush of the dinner hour. Scott had glanced at it and ordered a platter probably meant for four people, rather than just two.

"Did you plan this?" Scott inquires, picking his way through his half of the chicken wings. "And are you gonna eat anything? Came all the way out to buy you a drink on your birthday, Johnny, c'mon, it shouldn't be on an empty stomach."

"Plan what?"

Scott reaches over and taps his fingertip on the cover of the book John's using for a pillow. "This. Uh. These, I guess. Theses. Thesises? Happy birthday! No more toiling away in the mines of academia!"

"Theses." John sits up and rubs his forehead, then presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until the pressure makes him see stars. "No. Uh, no. I lost track of the day." He blinks. "Oh, this's why my phone's been blowing up."

"You didn't check?"

John shakes his head. "I get distracted, I put it in the microwave."

"It's your _birthday_." Scott finally reaches for his brother's empty plate, starts to load it up with wings and french fries and a couple tiny Kobe beef sliders.

"I've been awake for twenty-two hours doing a final revision. Digital copies were officially accepted for review this morning. I'm done. I mean, not—like, you know, not _done_ -done. Just mostly. The hard part, anyway." This is still a surreal and disorienting fact to try and contend with. John permits it to fall off the surface of his brain, pretends that he hadn't spent an hour and a half of this time sitting blankly on the floor of the shower until the water ran cold. "I mean, I still need to do the other thing. Defense. But I'm not worried about that."

Scott's eyes widen and John's shoulder gets a short, sharp punch, expertly delivered by the eldest of five brothers. "Jesus. Thought you seemed kind of out of it when I picked you up. Eat something. And gimme those. What're you doing with hard copies, anyway, if it's a digital submission?" Scott reaches over and takes one of the two volumes, opens it gingerly. The spine cracks slightly and he winces, puts it back down. "I had no idea you were actually _done_."

John's answer takes a few minutes, because he's been reminded that food exists and that it's necessary to sustain life. "The hard copies are just a formality, but I've got six more to pick up at the end of the week. Two for the school's archive, two for Dad, for his office. Uh, two for Grandma, though I dunno what the hell she wants with them. Just to have, I guess. These're mine. I got these two done as a rush job." He chuckles at the realization. "Yeah. Happy birthday, I guess."

Scott's set the pair of them side by side, black and gold, blue and silver. By this point John's read the titles so many times that the words have lost all meaning, but to Scott they're still fresh and new. "Wow. I mean, congratulations, John. Really. Uh. What're they about?" He pauses a moment, reading the titles. "...and which is which?"

This is probably a joke, but it's a joke meant to invite John to actually talk about the two documents that have eaten up the past four years of his life. He wipes his fingers very carefully on a napkin, scrubbing away crystals of salt, smudges of hot sauce and grease. Taps a fingertip on the black cover. "Carrot." Then the blue. "Stick."

Scott blinks at him. "Not sure I take your meaning?"

The blue is two hundred and twenty-three pages surrounding the development of custom modeling software, particular to a very specific type of turbulent molecular cloud. It's a cheater's thesis, with a programmer's heart and soul poured into it, dolled up in computational astrophysics. It's respectable. It'll stand up to review, possibly it'll even go on to be used and useful. It's a meaningful contribution. In the abstract, John's even proud of it. But when John picks it up, cracks the spine and thumbs through it, he doesn't actually _feel_ anything. At the end of the day, even an auspicious day twenty-one years coming— "This isn't important."

The black is John's own personal gospel, the black is what he _believes in._ He wipes his fingers on a napkin again before he picks up the black, reverential. " _This_ one, though." It's possibly the sleep deprivation, but John would swear that the thing weighs more than it should. A perfect three hundred pages, about the way the world is about to change. John's _sure_ of this, John's ready to stand up in front of a panel and champion the words he's put to paper—more accurately, John's _aching_ to stand up in front of a panel and get in a _fight_. Probably he's going to be advised against doing so, but it's going to be hard. _Inevitable Sentience: A New Evolutionary Paradigm in the Field of Complex Artificial Intelligence_. Handling the little black book, now more than ever, John feels like the thing could catch fire in his hands.

"That one what?" Scott prompts, and then gives John another prod in the shoulder when the answer is an owlish blink and a long minute of silence. "John?"

"...Did I not say anything out loud?"

"No, you just stared at your book for a solid sixty seconds." Scott laughs so loud that John jumps at the sound. "Little brother, you are _completely_ fried."

"I'm gonna be a doctorate astrophysicist, don't call me _little_. And a doctor of computer science." A beat. "And I'm taller than you. _And_ I'm twenty-one."

"—yeah, and you're gradually reverting to childhood." Scott grins and fishes in his back pocket for his phone, his wallet. He checks the time and then squints at his younger brother. "How're you doing?"

" _Dual-doctorates_."

Scott scoffs again, "Yeah, Johnny-Two-Doctorates. Great. Two doctorates and no damn sense, you need to go crash." He clears his throat loudly to catch the attention of the bartender, pulls out a black credit card and puts it down on the bar. "So, here's the deal. Tracy-1's on the runway at Logan, and I'm supposed to grab you and fly up to the New York office because Dad's pulled a party together. But I'm thinking maybe I give him a call and let him know I'm gonna buy you a drink and put you to bed instead, and we fly out tomorrow for a belated birthday-slash-congratulations-on-mostly-finishing-your- _theses_ party. How's that sound?"

Good. Actually, really good. With one minor criticism regarding unnecessary extra steps. "...how necessary is the drink?"

Scott rolls his eyes. "Dude. Come on. Virgil and Gordon've both already screwed me outta this one, and I'm not waiting for Alan. Your straight edges've gotta be good for _something_. Rite of passage, Johnny, c'mon."

"...yeah, all right."

Scott lights up at this, even as the bartender approaches, waits for Scott to order. "Yeah! One drink, and then we'll go hang out at your apartment for a minimum of eight hours, probably more like twelve. Happy birthday, J. And congratulations."


	4. a trail of stark white fire in its wake

**\- 2054 -**

The space station fills the dark space in the center of the amphitheater. It's beautiful. An elegant, perfect thing, far too easy to overstate and best allowed to speak for itself.

The rendered Earth below it turns slowly and a pale white line traces the arc of the station's orbit. This begins to decay. Slowly at first, the station starts to fall from its appointed path. There's a slow revolution of the station along its axis, trying to correct the course, but this fails. The slow fall becomes a far faster fall, and the playback starts to speed up along with it. Pieces of the station start to break off, burning as they fall. There's a low murmur through the audience.

They've already been told what it is, what it was for. They've already been told how much it cost. And now they're watching it burn, tearing itself apart as it loses its orbit, silent and empty and beautiful, leaving a trail of stark white fire in its wake.

It's possible (probable) that this has been tarted up by the visual effects engineers, but such is the nature of faking a space station crash.

The lights come up slowly, and Jeff takes his time up the steps to the stage at the center of the room. There are seats to accommodate a few thousand people, usually this is the venue for product launches, for year end conferences, or for the various other functions that TI puts on throughout the year.

Today they're occupied by only a handful of GDF brass, and these are the brassiest of the brass; the sort of highest-up higher-ups that have a say over a project of this scale and scope.

He's dressed in gray for the occasion, not that this is an occasion; or anyway not the sort of occasion that would've merited too much thought into the way he chose to dress. But it's a sleek gray suit, the sort of clean, sophisticated cut that flirts with conservatism but ultimately defies it. Echoes the grey of the GDF uniform; a tacit indication that he's on their side. He's not _quite_ trim enough to pull it off, but this is the sort of thought that would have been thought through and then discarded in front of the mirror, that morning. Anyway, the lights are low, and no one cares what he's wearing.

"So that was a fifty billion dollar space station," Jeff begins, nonchalant. He ambles around the forward rim of the circular stage, keeps his tone conversational as he continues, "And that's the presentation I'll be giving to my board of directors this evening, and then again to my investors tomorrow, about the way it experienced a cascading series of errors during a routine course correction, and fell out of orbit in the very early hours of this morning. Full reports will be available from R&D, and from the command center that was responsible for testing. No one was aboard, it was being operated remotely for precisely this reason. That was Thunderbird 5, Mark One. And none of that _actually_ happened."

Overhead, a schematic of the station coalesces into being again, whole and rendered in wireframe. Jeff points straight up, casual. "She's still up there. Still fully operational—still in _perfect_ operating condition, actually. Don't let the very technical accuracy of this apparent catastrophe fool you; we just know exactly what it would take to take her out of orbit. It's not difficult to engineer a scenario where it seems like that's exactly what happened. Production on Mark Two will start back up again within the week; at this point it's just a question of manufacture. Won't even cost as much, the second go round. A reason to scrub this station out of existence, scrap it, start fresh; put a second one up there. But the _first_ version."

Jeff pauses and grins out into the darkened theater. The lights glint off the eyes of the people watching him, and this is the feeling he likes best in the world, riding on a high of other people's anticipation. "The first version," he repeats, "has already started to take an inventory of the skies above. There isn't one, as you're all aware. If there _were_ a complete, unified inventory of every piece of space junk, every piece of ordnance; every last damn unregistered orbital mine or poorly thought out satellite weapon—well. That's your problem. The collective armament of low earth orbit; that is a massive, _complicated_ problem. And since there's no easy answer, it's time to change the terms of the question."

Above him, responsive to the rhythm of his movement across the stage, technical specifications of the station start to appear. Not the ship, but the ship's brain; the supercomputer that controls all its myriad functions. If the CPU is the brain, the Thunderbird 5's myriad sensors are an entire nervous system. "This is how we find out what's up there. A long, slow orbital path, complete and careful, altering around what it finds. An ongoing survey of everything we have to contend with, a system designed to find and completely identify every last item in orbit. When we know what we're dealing with, then we'll deal with it."

The next question is obvious and he hears it in his head— _We?_ —before he goes on to answer it. "Now, I have to be clear; this station remains the legal property of Tracy Industries. The software aboard it; the scanning protocols, all of the systems designed to _very carefully_ have a look at what's up there, without being observed—that all remains my property. This is the technology upon which I've built my empire and it'd just be damn bad business sense to hand it over. What I'm offering you is the data it comes up with; and the guarantee that when this sweep comes to completion, I'll have developed whatever means are necessary to proceed with disarmament."

The audience mutters amongst themselves, but it doesn't matter. Jeff's already sure that they'll take the bid, that his is the first coherent solution that's been proposed to the problem. There are sayings about ports in storms, about the value of birds in hand, about the devil you know and the devil you don't—Jeff's never been one to turn down an idiom if it suited his purpose. Typically he prefers to style himself after the storm rather than the port, but, as they say—

There's a reason this proposal came to him, and there's a reason that his counter won't be rejected, whatever caveats he places upon it. There are different types of power in the world, and his is the power of industry, the sort of power that lets him wave away fifty _billion_ dollars, and consign an entire space station to a slow, interminable task; like counting the stars in the sky.

Well.

He's going to have to count at least _some_ of them, if one day he plans to pull them down.

* * *

His room is only his room, and only by merit of his roommate having flunked out of the program, failed his last round of training sims. John's not particularly sorry he's gone. Not that there was anything wrong with the guy, it's just that having a room to himself contributes to the overall experience. There aren't a lot of other single operators in training up here, and anywhere he can find a little bit of solitude seems immensely valuable.

Makes it easier to call home, too, and he's been trying to do so more often.

Still, it's a rare enough occurrence that Virgil's plainly surprised when he picks up the call. In the split second it takes him to recognize John, his face splits into a beaming grin, pure joy, "Hey! G'morning Starshine, the Ear—"

" _Don_ _'t_ ," John interrupts, but it brings a smile to his face, makes him scoff and then grimace. "Is that really gonna stick? Gordon gets to give me a nickname?"

"Gordon's the only one who's tried." Virgil clears his throat and his image destabilizes as he picks up his comm, carries it somewhere more comfortable. There's a rapid jog up the stairs from what John figures was the kitchen, as Virgil drops down to sit on one of the couches in the lounge, and then picks the conversation back up, corrects himself. "Well, no, actually he put together a list and then we took a vote."

John's taken the opportunity to move from the bottom bunk to the top bunk in his little cubbyhole of a room, and through the rectangular slice of the window over his head, the Earth drifts slowly past. He's still in the plain grey coverall that constitutes his day-to-day wear, but he's pulled off his boots, discarded his monitors and comms, undone his suit at the collar. Now he sits cross-legged in his stockinged feet front of the little projector. Virgil's image is a bit fuzzier than it should be over lower than ideal bandwidth, but still a welcome sight. "A _vote_."

Virgil's ramping up into it now, spinning off into the grand, fanciful, and halfway fictional accounts of life at home in John's absence. "Or well, you know, technically it went to committee. Sputnik was on there, that got a veto. Unpatriotic, damn commies, et cetera. _I_ was down to call you Ziggy, as in Stardust, on account of the whole skinny ginger thing, but it didn't make it past the first round."

"Shame."

"I can still call you Ziggy if you want. Space Oddity."

"Major Tom," John answers, attempting to banter right back, but then the reason for the call catches up to him and it suddenly stops being so funny, even if it's only Virgil. He clears his throat, shrugs, makes the mistake of trying to keep talking, "Uh, yeah. Well, whatever. I mean, probably they hear that kinda thing a lot around here, probably it wouldn't be that funny. Cliche. Probably I'd have to run fifty laps of the grav ring or…um, or—I don't know, haven't had a lot of discipline thrown my way."

"Scrub out a space latrine with your space toothbrush," Virgil volunteers helpfully.

"Sure."

"Man. They sure are bastards up at Camp Hadfield."

It's the colloquial name of the Hadfield Center for Astronautics, NASA's low earth orbit facility for astronaut training. John's nearly at the end of his term. It's been hard, but rewarding. High-pressure, but he's discovered that this is somewhere he thrives. And they aren't actually bastards up at Camp Hadfield, but some of the most experienced astronauts in the world, and the best teachers John could ever have hoped for. If college had been a place of enlightenment, this is probably a hell of a lot closer to John's own personal version of Nirvana. "Uh huh."

"Damn. Don't they know who our father is? Guess nobody cuts the rich kid any slack."

No, but he wouldn't expect them too. Virgil's just teasing, but he keeps inadvertently completing circuits in John's brain. It's hard to keep up with the levity of the conversation, remembering why he'd called. For a few blissful minutes he'd managed to let it slip his mind, but now he's got it sitting in his chest like a lump of lead and needs to change the subject. "Uh. Hey, so…has…has Dad called? Lately, I mean?"

Virgil's got a certain savvy where his brothers are concerned, always has and hopefully always will have, because John kind of counts on it. Sometimes. More often than he should. His brown eyes have narrowed slightly and he's shifted on the couch, perked up a bit. "Dunno, not that I heard. Why, were you wanting to get through to him?"

No, definitely not. Kind of that's actually the whole problem, though John's not sure how to say so. Not actually sure if he's _allowed_ to say so, not sure if what he's been told was told in confidence. But it's sitting in the middle of his stomach and a lot of long moments are stretching past without an answer to Virgil's question, so Virgil poses another one. "John? You okay?"

"Dad called. Um, me. Earlier."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." This hasn't started well.

Virgil's chewing his lower lip now, concerned, but he knows not to sound it as he presses, "Something wrong?"

"I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell…to talk about this." Actually, it's starting to seem like a really bad idea to repeat what he's been told, but he's also not sure if he can stand keeping it a secret. Hopefully Virgil knows what to say.

John's never known just how Virgil's figures these things out; the whole social ebb and flow of information, but he stays the course, coaxes, "Well, can't be that big a deal if he'd call you up at Hadfield, he knows what their deal is. If it was something you couldn't repeat, he wouldn't have told you, or he'd have told you to keep it to yourself. Dad's not a guy who leaves loose threads. What's up, John?"

Sometimes you just have to say things. "Thunderbird 5 fell out of orbit."

There's a beat and then, "Jesus _Christ_. What—when? "

John's got the full report of what happened, every last sordid detail, forwarded along from his father. He hasn't been able to convince himself to look at it yet. So he doesn't know the exact time, shrugs as he answers, "Early this morning, I guess. Uh, my morning." John's morning was about ten hours ago.

Virgil doesn't get mad about much, but immediately he's mad about this, righteously, rightfully angry. "Dad called to tell you that and then he just let you sit on it all day. _Shit_. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm fine—" The stitching that runs along the inseam of his pant leg is suddenly fascinating, worth tracing over with a fingertip, carefully counting individual stitches.

"Really? Because I would be really, _really_ not fine if I'd been told something like that. You're on a fucking space station, that's not the right damn place to get that news, John."

John flinches and then hastily, trying to bandage up all the same things he'd felt, upon hearing the news, "I mean—no one was aboard, no one was hurt. Dad says it was just—and, that's the other thing, it was still within the parameters of what an operator would've been able to bail out of. The point of no return was far enough out that it would've been possible to abandon ship before full catastrophic failure, but…" He pauses, loses the thread of that line of thought and finds a new one, "I guess, I mean, I think he must've wanted…wanted me to know first. Obviously. Probably he didn't want me hearing it on the news or something, or—or from one of my instructors. It was probably good that he called me, I just—" John clears his throat and goes on to the thing he's been trying to talk himself into, trying to find the conviction that it's true— "I should be able to handle that, though. Right? Bad news is supposed to be my job. Is going to be my job."

Virgil doesn't look convinced, but he's also just been barreled over by a long stretch of babbled rationalization and doesn't seem to know if it's the right move to try and pick it apart. "John, man—"

"It's really okay." It's really not, but it helps to say so. "I probably shouldn't talk about it any more." That's true, at least.

This is probably the only thing that's going to keep Virgil from _insisting_ that they talk about it, the fact that yeah, this is maybe something John shouldn't have repeated. This is big and corporate and _bad_. "Okay. Yeah, okay." He frowns though, a deep divot between his brows and his arms folded over his chest. "Stay on the line for a while, all right?"

"Yeah." Even if it doesn't seem like it to Virgil, John's pretty sure he's starting to feel better. "We could talk about something else," John suggests, hopeful. There has to be plenty worth talking about. Small talk. Easy enough.

"Sure, John, whatever you want."

The silence between them is starting to get awkward when John clears his throat, and takes a shot, "So. Uh. How's—so, how's _your_ day going?"

"Oh well, you know. Grandma burnt breakfast earlier. Gordon's been shaving his chest in my bathroom again. Pretty sure we've got a spider infestation in the attic and apparently I'm the guy who's supposed to deal with that." Virgil chuckles, short, a little bit sarcastic, and the last shred of commentary he'll make on the subject no longer at hand, "But by comparison, not really all that bad."


	5. with no expense or luxury spared

**\- 2055 -**

It's strange to find oneself in the high court of another man's empire.

The floor is mottled black marble beneath a plush Persian rug of black and gold wool. Grecian columns support a barrel-vaulted ceiling, the cream-coloured exterior walls curve subtly inward. A crystal chandelier hangs in the center. The place is all trimmed in black and ivory and gold.

The place is trying a little too hard. It's the sort of cheap, aspirational imitation that misses the point of what it tries to emulate. Tawdry, dividing itself between marble and gold and crystal, as though all of these taken together must total up to a real impression of wealth. In Jeff's opinion these are all less effective than the elements of his preference—steel and wood and concrete and glass. Organic shapes. Smooth, powerful lines. Calling back to a bygone era of industry and innovation.

If Jeff's distaste is for the man's office, then Hugh's is reserved for the man on the other side of the desk. The man who sits across from him has clearly gone to an effort to keep up appearances. In person he's—smoother, more refined than Jeff had expected of him. His clothes are tailored, his fingernails are manicured and his manner is neat, precise. A pot of mint tea on a silver tray sits between their host and his guests, sweet and fragrant. Hugh had accepted a cup as it was poured, but since hasn't touched this; Jeff's been through three already as the conversation has moved through the usual banal pleasantries.

Belah Gaat clears his throat. Abruptly the pleasantries cease. "You must forgive me for calling attention to my brother's absence, Mr. Tracy. But I cannot help but feel as though it was an act of protest. I can only imagine he attempted to discourage you from meeting with me at all. May I ask why he failed to convince you?" Belah chuckles and reclines slightly in his chair, darkly amused, "It would be dishonest to pretend that at least _some_ of what he's told you isn't true."

This is an incredibly delicate question and Jeff has to take another swallow of cooling mint tea in order to give himself time to concoct an answer. At his elbow, Hugh remains still and silent, radiating contempt, but in that impossibly subtle manner that's indistinguishable from quintessential aristocratic Britishness.

"Well," Jeff begins, carefully plotting his course through the approach he wishes to take, "I hired your brother by merit of his reputation. The sort of reputation that recommends a mercenary isn't the sort of reputation I would have expected of the man I've found Kyrano to be. I made him an offer at the outset of our relationship, but it was his counter that secured our partnership."

The arch of an eyebrow invites Jeff to continue.

"He asked if I would be willing to afford his daughter the same opportunities I've afforded my sons. Said that he'd take on the security of my company and its interests, the safety and privacy of myself and my family, if I would help his daughter towards a future that wasn't tied to her family's past."

"To me, you mean."

"Your brother's words, not mine." Jeff deflects. There's been a great deal of carefully rerouted information around this entire meeting. It's why he and Hugh are here in Parker's company and not Kyrano's. Generally Jeff keeps his head of security well-apprised of his movements, but in this specific case, he's deliberately covered his trail, and the path that's led him to Belah Gaat.

Who is, by more than just reputation, a war-profiteer, under a global trade embargo from the GDF, and the man responsible for the lion's share of the mess that's been made of low earth orbit. The path that's led Jeff to him began with the slow, careful inventory being taken by the Heavenward Satellite. Half of what's in orbit now is semi-functional, scraps and shambles of military hardware that have been hacked up and crammed together and made just sound enough to survive the trip into orbit. Remote evaluation has turned up the same traits and tendencies in the manufacture of a substantial percentage of what litters the sphere around the earth. Cross-reference had turned up a hornets' nest of construction companies, contractors, subsidiaries and sub-subsidiaries. And at the root of all of it is the sort of man who builds a room like this one, a temple to his own accomplishments.

If he's honest, Jeff's more than a little impressed.

And, so long as he's being honest, Jeff's always going to have a soft spot for the self-made man. He'll always be fond of the underdog. And in this case, the underdog represents a shortcut, at least a partial solution to the problem he's set out to solve. If the underdog happens to be a man who could benefit from some legitimacy by association—well. It just so happens that he's also a man who could do Jeff Tracy a favour.

There's nothing that pleases Jeff more than reciprocity, but in this case he feels the need to couch it in a rather loftier motive. "As far as I'm aware, all that separates you from your brother is the opportunities you were afforded. Whatever the context, you've created an industry for yourself. That's impressive."

The irises of Gaat's eyes are strange, oddly flat and a hazel colour that blends towards gold. "Thank you," he says, after what seems like a rather long pause. "You're a man worth impressing, Mr. Tracy. You must excuse me for being wary of obvious flattery. I cannot imagine my modest enterprise caught your attention purely on its own merits. As my current endeavours stand, these are few."

Jeff clears his throat, but it's Hugh who speaks, "Your current endeavours are of no particular concern. It's a past endeavor that needs to be dealt with, and while I freely admit to my reticence, Jefferson assures me that it will simplify matters exponentially if we can secure your cooperation."

This gets a hearty chuckle and there's an appreciative gleam in Gaat's golden eyes. "Ah, here is a man who has the measure of me. Tell me, Lord Creighton-Ward, is peace as kind and _genteel_ as you had hoped it would be, now that the world has fallen into line and agreed to play nice?"

"Ours is a relative peace, and was won at a high cost," Hugh answers, icy and implacable. "And it was in spite of your contribution, and not because of it. Your cooperation is requested. It is not required."

Gaat and Hugh have the polished tones of the upper class in common, but where Hugh was born into his legacy, Gaat's was built from the ground up, scraped and soldered together from next to nothing. It's against sage advice and possibly against his better judgment that Jeff favours the latter. He intercedes before things can grow any frostier, before Hugh can inadvertently (or, in Hugh's case, very deliberately) freeze him out. "Mr. Gaat, I've been asked to spearhead a project on behalf of the GDF. I'd like to bring you into it."

Jeff imagines, not incorrectly, that Gaat has already anticipated something like this; guessed at the reason why one of the most powerful industrialists in the world had requested this meeting. His gaze is penetrating as he confirms this.

"You're going to ask me to help dismantle the empire upon which I made my fortune." The man's tone is ambiguous. It's possible he's amused, possible he's offended. Jeff's unaccustomed to people who are difficult to read. But Gaat continues, "You mean to suggest that there's a margin of profit in unmaking the mess I've already made? For a man who hopes to offer me some semblance of legitimacy, I must say, Mr. Tracy; this seems like a deplorable means of making my name."

"Better than standing by a reputation as a war-profiteer and a criminal," Jeff counters.

"I've been a very successful war-profiteer, and I think you'll find the term _criminal_ to be a word that's grayer than it is dirty." There's a pause, long enough to seem thoughtful, as though Gaat's considering the offer. "You're aware that the GDF won't deal with me."

Jeff nods. He harbours the private suspicion that he's doing exactly what the GDF cannot, and that this is among the reasons why they'd approached him. "Which is why you'd be dealing with me. Something like a silent partnership. When the whole thing resolves itself, we can publicly represent the value of your contribution."

"Dealing with you through proxies and subsidiaries, I'm sure." There's a curl of Gaat's lip, already dismissive.

And there's the rub. It's too sensitive for proxies and subsidiaries. The whole project is split into a hundred pieces, buried in bureaucracy to muddle the ultimate intent, so as not to tip their hand. Jeff's divided all its myriad pieces between departments, outsourced what he can, and gone so far as to scratch an entire space station out of orbit to cover his tracks. There are precious few people he can trust with this level of involvement. "No. Dealing with _me_."

"And me," Hugh adds, a quiet, subtle warning, possibly in response to the way Gaat smiles, slow and genuine.

"That changes my measure of things. Forgive me for expecting you to insult me. If it's a deal with the man himself, then I could not possibly decline," he answers, smooth as silk as he stands to extend a hand across the desk. His fingers are improbably thick and bedecked onyx and gold and the ivory of bone, a carven ring upon his thumb. "I look forward to doing business with you."

As Jeff stands and shakes Gaat's hand, Hugh watches and refrains from comment. It's not as though Jeff hasn't heard it all before. He'll continue to hear it for the entire year to come.

* * *

When John was thirteen, in an attempt to be clever, he'd done something that was actually extremely stupid, and once a year, every year, on a slightly different date; it comes back to bite him in the ass.

Gordon and Kayo are both turning nineteen this year, and ever since that first occasion, ten years ago—when it had been Gordon's brilliant idea to have a joint birthday party with the newest member of the family's social circle—their party falls on one of the weekends between Gordon's February 14th and Kayo's February 27th.

This year it's a yacht in the Bahamas, and the guest list is mostly Gordon's friends, with no expense or luxury spared in flying them out for the party in question. There's food and light and music and no matter how they feel about each other the rest of the year, for this one night, Kayo and Gordon are always the very best friends.

Gifts are always strictly optional and not expected, in true "what do you give the son of a billionaire?" fashion. Still, there are a pair of brand new jet skis in dandelion yellow and deep emerald green, Gordon's given Kayo a custom surfboard and she's given him a knife she'd made herself from an old railroad spike, with a leather-wrapped handle and a wicked blade. But gifts really aren't the point. Tonight is more about fun and family and friends and the fact that in international waters and with Kyrano strictly managing the bar, the drinking age has been tweaked down on behalf of the birthday boy and girl.

So Kayo's cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright when John manages to catch her attention, from the quiet stretch of the deck where he's spent most of the evening, in between making what appearances would be considered polite. She breaks off from a game of cards with Virgil and Scott and blows a kiss to her father behind the bar, before she rounds the corner and beams at John. "That time again?"

John shrugs, grins a bit sheepishly. "I never know how to do this in a way that isn't awkward."

Kayo folds her arms and rolls her eyes. "Well, if you'd just stick it with the rest of the gifts—" she suggests, as though this is entirely his fault, which is probably true.

"Well, I always worry you won't like it."

"Got a pretty good track record so far," Kayo points out. And then, impatient, she sticks her hand out, open-palmed and teasingly imperious. "Gimme. Quick like a bandaid, John, cough it up."

She and Gordon are both a little tipsy, and Kayo mixes metaphors like drinks. Obligingly, John fishes in his pocket and places a small box wrapped in shimmering silver paper in Kayo's hand. With exaggerated formality she examines the careful job he's done of wrapping the little velvet box, and then tears it open, quick and efficient, and pops the lid—

"Oh! Ooh, _good choice_ , John. Well _done_ ," she declares, just the same as she does every year, but with the genuine, wholehearted delight, that permits John to stop holding his figurative breath and second-guessing his selection.

From a little black cushion inside the box, Kayo picks up a tiny jet plane, platinum, and rendered in exquisite detail. Around her wrist, the charm bracelet this belongs to shifts around her skin, gleaming in the starlight overhead. On it already are an amethyst, wrapped in a filigree of silver, a butterfly, a motorcycle and a surfboard. John had initially figured he was being terribly clever, locking down a gift to get Kayo, once a year. As it had turned out, he'd still needed to think extremely hard about the sorts of things that Kayo liked, only now he'd been confined to the world of what already existed as bracelet charms. "You heard I got my pilot's license, then."

John nods, shrugs again, sheepish. "Yeah. Felt a bit like cheating; had to get Dad's permission to get it 3D printed. And I mean, it's still _years_ out, and it actually took some convincing, now that the schematics are finalized. And I still had to set all the parameters myself and make sure the data got wiped out of the printer I used. Anyway. I'm _pretty_ sure it's too small for anybody to try and pirate the design, but, uh…" John gestures at the tiny model of Thunderbird Shadow, dangling from Kayo's fingertips. "Anyway, happy birthday."

Kayo blinks and then there's a genuine gasp as she squints at the tiny craft. "Oh my god, John, is this _really_ …?

He can't help a smile at her surprise, that he's actually gone and done it. "Yeah." And then, rubbing the back of his neck. "Um, so maybe don't let anybody steal that. I think I'd catch hell."

Her eyes flash up and her answering grin is challenging, defiant. "You wanna try and take it off me?" she prompts, and her fingers close tight around the tiny charm, balling up into a fist.

"Definitely not." He chuckles and puts his hands back in his pockets. The deck of the yacht rolls gently beneath the soles of his shoes and with the nervousness that goes along with gift giving over and done with, John can stop pretending that the vaguely woozy feeling is anything but seasickness. "I mean, even if anybody did, I'm pretty sure it's too small to do anything with. But that's what it's gonna be. Shadow."

Kayo's gone ahead and fiddled with the tiny, delicate clasp, though her fingers are quick and clever and she has no trouble fixing it to a waiting spot on the bracelet around her wrist. It jingles softly and she turns it to catch the light. "Wow. Oh _wow_ , John. _Thank you_."

He's aware that his cheeks have flushed, but it's entirely the fact that he's pleased with how pleased she is. A little smugly, slyly maybe, he comments, "Gotta have a Thunderbird, if you wanna be a member of this family, right?" John pauses and adds, "Don't say anything, but in about fifteen minutes Dad's gonna pull up in 'Four and give it to Gordon, officially. But _shh_ though, it's supposed a surprise."

Kayo laughs, warm and bright and golden, and threads her arm through John's. "Well, we're not going to miss _that_. Come along, John. I'll buy you a drink, I've got a rapport with the bartender" She stretches up onto her tiptoes and pecks a sisterly kiss on his cheek. "And thank you."

"Happy birthday, Kayo."


	6. a very rare juxtaposition

**\- 2056 -**

Lord Hugh Creighton-Ward is missing the first finger on his left hand, and for as long as Jeff has been aware of this fact, he still can't help staring.

Granted, he's only been aware of this fact for about fifteen minutes.

But maybe Hugh means for it to be stared at, because his hand rests on desk between them, and the stump of his finger has rusted the bandages around it, blunt, in more ways than one.

"Sent it to my _daughter_ , Jefferson." Hugh's voice is hoarse, harsh, deep and guttural with emotion. There's a glass half full of amber liquor and the first light of dawn, the second Jeff's poured for him from the bottle he keeps in his desk, in his private office. "Done up beautifully in a gold box with a white ribbon, with my name on it. On the bed. In her _room_."

This statement makes Kyrano shift his weight, though he doesn't move from where he stands, with his back against the office door. Jeff knows why. Doesn't look up.

It doesn't need to be stated that Penelope had gone on to open the box in question, because some hours after the incident in question, a private plane had breached Tracy Island's airspace. Kyrano had opened radio contact and been about to issue the standard warnings that the vessel in question needed to turn back or be subject to forcible escort out of the vicinity—when Parker had requested clearance to land, and cited concerns as to the security of his principle.

There aren't many places safer than this peaceful, idyllic island in the South Pacific, with its surveilled airspace and its villa, sheathed all in hurricane proof glass, built into the bedrock of a volcanic island.

Jeff's had the bare bones of the story from Parker. A swift, sudden attack, in the sort of place where Hugh almost never finds himself, the sort of place where he's vulnerable. It had been a calculated, predatory sort of strike, circumventing all of Hugh's usual, careful security. And made worse by the fact that its single objective had not been assassination, but to maim him and send a message to his daughter. Internally, Jeff cringes from the horror of this, but keeps his expression under tight control.

A great deal hinges upon what he says next.

And he means to be careful, means to be tactful, when he makes his first comment, "Well, Hugh, a man in your profession makes a great many enemies—" he starts, but doesn't get to finish.

Because this was the wrong thing to say.

Because beneath Hugh's hand the glass _smashes_ , slams into the top of the desk and shatters. Liquor mingles with blood as the Englishman staggers to his feet, his palm pressed flat atop shards of broken glass as he leans over the desk, even as Jeff recoils away from him, startled." _Christ_ , Hugh!"

"I am not here seeking _safe haven_ , Jefferson," Hugh snarls, and to spite the fact that he's obviously shaken, that he's drawn and halfway drunk, his voice is a thunderclap, a roll of drums, all theatrical command and precise elocution. Still, he's unsteady on his feet and his weight leans more heavily across the desk as he continues, "I am not here to cower away from _my_ enemies, but to warn you of _yours_. I am here because _you_ hide your children away, sheltered and secret in the South Pacific, safe from the consequences of _your_ actions."

"Hugh, _Jesus_. Stop this, you'll—" Jeff reaches for Hugh's wrist, tries to pull his friend's hand up off the shards of glass that litter the desktop, but instead the man's other hand—the one that's already bloodied and missing its forefinger—slams into his chest, grabs at his shirtfront. Rusty bandages begin to redden as not-enough fingers spasm and clench at Jeff's collar.

Across the room, Kyrano makes no move to intercede. His green-gold eyes burn just the same as Hugh's pale blue, though it's the latter that demand Jeff's attention, staring and wide, and bright, bright, bright with terrified madness.

"I warned you," Hugh hisses, hoarse and furious, "Every step you've taken down this path, I have _warned you_ , that the depths of this would be your undoing. Now _he_ _'s_ trying to drive me away, to run me off, before I can undo his hold on you. Your pet _warlord_ , the tiger you think you've seized by the tail—"

The Lord Hugh Creighton-Ward spent two decades in the service of world government, before there even _was_ a World Government. He's been a spy, an assassin, a player on the stage of a world at war, and after that, a global advocate for peace. Hugh has diminished from his position as a public figure, in late middle age, and what might respectfully be labeled retiring modesty is in actuality the behaviour of a paranoid recluse, with deeply entrenched PTSD.

Hugh refuses to meet in a building taller than a single story. Above ground level he gets anxious, unsettled in a hundred small ways, because at one point in his life he was thrown through a window. It's a reality of Hugh's company that he is always, _always_ armed, and though his hands tremor on occasion, he remains a dead-eyed shot with a revolver. Hugh's clothes are all specially made, Jeff's never known him to wear anything but a three-piece-suit, and every piece of this is bulletproof. Hugh is almost never out of his bodyguard's company, and only surrenders Parker's presence when his daughter needs him more.

Jeff's hand closes around Hugh's wrist, and his own fingers are broad and strong and _intact_. Jeff's entire body isn't trembling; he isn't taut and rigid with fury and terror. He's calm and patient and reasonable and sensitive to the fact that his longtime friend and colleague is in a nightmarish hell of trauma—and that this is no time to draw rash conclusions. "Hugh, from what Parker's said about what happened—there's no way you could be certain as to who's behind this."

It's a lie, of course. With Kyrano's eyes still blazing at him across the room, with the way he's got his hands full of his own mistakes—and with the way he's been learning more and more about the tendencies of his silent, and until now, _secret_ partner—it's very, very clear who's behind this. Hugh's started to breathe heavily, and his eyes are wide, wild. He's not wrong, but Jeff wonders if it might not be better for the moment if he doesn't necessarily know it.

Kyrano breaks eye contact to open the door of the office and slip outside, presumably to go and fetch Parker. Jeff is left alone in Hugh's company. As the latch of the door clicks closed, Hugh seems to draw up some semblance of mastery, his hand releases from Jeff's shirt front, and he pulls away, taking his bloodied hand from the desktop as he stands upright. He sways slightly, but keeps his feet even as red runs from his palm to his fingertips, drips onto the floor.

"You've let him too close. You've told him of the existence of your _damned_ satellite and behind your back he's making overtures to find and take it over. If he gains control—"

"He won't. _Can_ _'t_ ," Jeff interrupts, and repeats himself, even though he knows the sentiment is hollow and not for Hugh's benefit. "Hugh, you have no way of knowing—"

But the door opens and Parker appears in the doorway, briskly crosses the room to Hugh's elbow and apparently cares for no one and nothing else in the room. His voice is low and soft, carefully controlled. Jeff turns away, retreats towards the window that dominates the back wall of his office, cantilevered out over the cliffside that drops away beneath the villa.

He fixes his gaze on the horizon, on the rising sun, and thinks about mistakes and the fact that he's made them. He doesn't hear the door open and close again, and if he hears the turn of the lock, the solid _thunk_ of tumblers setting into place, he doesn't consider the implications—not until he turns and finds Kyrano's crossed the room on silent feet, that he's crossed into Jeff's personal space, and—

His movement is sudden; a brusque, carefully measured burst of surprising force that jerks Jeff off balance, sends him stumbling away from the window and staggering against his desk. Before he can recover, reeling off balance, Kyrano's pounced forward again, and one hand cinches a tight fistful at the back of Jeff's collar, the other twists and slams Jeff's arm against the desktop. Kyrano shifts, levers his weight and one of his knees presses against the small of Jeff's back, forces the air from his lungs before he can shout in pain or protest. His hands come free for the barest moment, just enough for one to pin the wrist of Jeff's hand flat to the desk, while the other procures a knife.

The edge of this flashes golden in the corner of Jeff's eyeline. Just above the hilt, clenched in Kyrano's fist, serrated ripteeth draw drops of blood from the skin, just above the knuckle of Jeff's first finger. The edge of it presses downward ever so slightly, until a sharp breath of pain, panic, hisses through Jeff's teeth.

"I was always the man to do this, on my brother's behalf." Kyrano's voice is so soft that it doesn't quite compete with the beat of Jeff's pulse in his ears. "Which of your boys shall it go to, do you think? I favour Virgil, myself."

"Kyr—"

Jeff's bodyguard increases the pressure of his knee against Jeff's back and a faint, painful whine is the only sound he can make as his chest compresses, ribs pinioned against the edge of the desk.

"You've dealt with my brother." Kyrano's fingers around Jeff's wrist tighten, until his nails bite into flesh, and it's a fact stated with something close to utter and complete loathing. "The difference between my brother and I is that he always hated to dirty his hands, and dirtied mine instead."

He eases the pressure of his knee from Jeff's back, and puts the knife away. His hands come away and Jeff's got nowhere to go but the floor, hacking and coughing, his brain buzzing with sudden adrenaline, pain. He manages to lift his gaze just in time to see Kyrano wiping his hands on his shirt, as though he's suddenly found them filthy. He's still catching his breath as Kyrano continues, icy.

"You'll tell me what you've done. And then you'll _pray_ that there is a way for this to be dealt with."

* * *

The last time he saw Penny was at her family's Christmas Ball, black tie and tails and the lilting strings of a chamber ensemble, the strains of the Nutcracker Suite filling a ballroom. The English countryside had been blanketed in snow and it had been a lovely evening. Lady Penelope has a quality of radiance about her, and had been particularly warm and bright and joyful, a star in the darkness of Christmas Eve. Not actually all that long ago.

It's dawn, now, and the middle of the island's summer, late January. The air is warm and the skies are a cloudless bright blue and not inky velvet, scattered with stars. And she's not in the halls of her family's estate, but in the middle of a tiny patch of nowhere in the South Pacific, the secret, private part of the world that John's family calls home. Above the pool deck looms the villa's angular bulk, and behind that rest of the island soars high, craggy stone and lush greenery. In its shadow, she's tiny—though in John's memory she's _always_ tiny, even in heels and a ballgown—and seems tinier still in an oversized sweater and jeans, entirely too warm for the climate. Out over the pool and down beyond the island's eastern face, the sea stretches out, rose gold in the light of dawn.

Counting Penelope near the top of a very short list of his closest friends, John's pretty sure he's meant to do something, seeing her now, standing just at the edge of the pool, facing away with her arms wrapped across her chest and her shoulders shaking. As far as John's aware, this is the first time she's ever been here. Maybe she's expected. But given the hour and the fact that this is first he's heard of it, John's pretty sure this visit wasn't planned.

"Penelope?"

She freezes, but doesn't turn, and the soft sound of the wind lapping at the water of the pool doesn't quite cover the way her breath hitches and gasps, the way she stifles what must have wanted to be a sob.

John takes the steps down from the upper deck, stops just short of what he considers a reasonable personal bubble—approximately eight feet, in his generous estimate. Mentally he's running an inventory of who the hell else is available—Kayo's off training, Grandma's still asleep. If Scott's up, John hasn't seen him, and Virgil and Gordon are in the Mediterranean, putting Thunderbirds 2 and 4 through their paces, with Brains acting as supervisor. Alan's fifteen, which probably disqualifies him from serving as anyone's pillar of emotional support.

This is supposed to be John's job, anyway. Somehow it's easier from low earth orbit, with a comm channel and all the earth's atmosphere between him and anyone who needs help. He clears his throat and knows better than to reach for the standard script. "Hey, Penny—hey, are you..."

The next breath she takes is deep and shuddery, but she manages to lift her head and turns to face him. Her eyes are bright and red and wet and her face is tearstreaked, and she shakes her head, seems a bit dazed and disconnected as she answers, "Fine. Fine, quite all right. I'm being dreadfully—terribly, _awfully_ silly, losing m-my head. I've no cause to be such an utter... _useless_ —and I mean _really_ , no excuse to—to be so upset; I _mustn't_ be so upset." She blinks, though it squeezes tears down her cheeks and she has to press the heels of her hands against her eyes and another sob threatens her voice, even as she says, "Excuse me, please, do excuse me. I'm being very foolish."

"Do you want to sit down?" John asks, and hazards a few steps closer. "Are you..." It seems insultingly trite to ask if she's okay, regardless of what she says, because it's clearly not the case. "Did...did something happen?" And then, reaching out to take her elbow and pull her gently over to the nearest lounge chair, he asks again, a little less tentative, "Penelope, what happened? Take a few deep breaths."

"My...mm. My father." She shakes her head, but takes a hiccuping breath and a huge sniffle, nods. He's sat her down on one of the lounge chairs and crouched in front of it, a very rare juxtapostion that puts them at almost the same height. She's caught one of his hands and hasn't let go, clinging with both of hers. Her fingers play at the paths traced by integrated circuitry and the difference in the fabric between his palms and the back of his hands. Penelope blinks and looks up, looks him over, suddenly distracted.

"...Oh," she says, "you're in your—" one of her hands leaves his, waves up and down, "—that."

"Uniform?" John supplies, glancing down at his blues. "Yeah. Uh, yeah. I start my next rotation at UTC 1200h, I was just going down to the hangar, but—"

"I hadn't seen it. I've seen Scott, once. It's a good colour," Penelope informs him, her fingers still wrapped around his wrist. "A very good colour for you, John. Brings out your eyes. Very nice."

"Thank you. Your father, though? Penny? Did...is he okay? Did something happen?"

"I don't know. No one's told me, I don't _know_." She shudders and her eyes drift away, past him, a bit blank and focused on something in the middle distance. Her voice is soft, though it picks up in volume and soon she's stammering, stumbling over her words again, "There was— _oh_. In my _room_. But, I—I must've...was just such a shock, everything went—but then Parker was there and then the car and our _plane_ and... _oh_."

"Penny, _breathe_."

She does, but it doesn't seem to help, bursts back out of her as more words, tumbling and bleeding together. "It was such a long flight, and I must've slept, because n-now...Now we're here, and he's gone to—I don't know where, Parker went with him, and they said I should stay here, but I—I don't... _god_ , oh god, _Daddy_ , I just—h-he..."

Her voice shatters and she dissolves into tears again, only now she reaches out and seems to have nowhere to go but into an awkward hug, pressing her face against his shoulder and seeming smaller than ever. "My father, John," she sobs. "My father, my _father_."

John's already planning to go find Grandma, but if his father's up, then John can ring the comm on his desk. Behind Penelope's back, with one hand awkwardly patting her hair, he's already keying in his dad's extension. "Pen, it's—Penny, it's okay. It's okay, you're safe. My dad'll help, Penelope. I promise. If he can do anything, he'll do it, and he won't let anything else happen. Honest, Penelope. My dad will help."


	7. pretending to be a dead man

**\- 2057 -**

In a lot of ways, he's lucky.

For the one person he trusted when he shouldn't have, there are that many more people that he _can_ , and now finds that he must.

Jeff could certainly find himself in far worse company than Lee Taylor's, on the day he learns that he's a dead man. Or, at least, that he's well and truly dead to the only people to whom his life ever really mattered.

Lee's hand is firm on Jeff's shoulder, and though there've been moments in the last six months that they've all but wanted to murder each other; when Kyrano delivers the news, Lee's company is probably better than he deserves.

It comes in the form of a voice mail, left on Kyrano's private line. Scott must have gotten the number from Kayo, specifically for this call. Kyrano's phone sits in the middle of the dining room table, its small screen strangely bright in the twilit darkness. The speaker fills the room with surprising magnitude, or maybe it's just that the silence has been waiting for a voice to fill it.

"Kyrano. Uh, this is Scott. We're—uh, the family, that is—we're going to go public with an announcement Monday morning, but I thought it would only be right if we called you first; we're, uh. We've all decided that it's time to call off the search. For Dad. Dividing our time without any result is starting to…to take its toll, I think. Six months is—I mean, it's been probably longer than we should've—anyway. That was our choice, then, and I guess it's our choice now. We're gonna be okay, but I wanted to let you know. And to thank you, for all your help. We'll talk to you again soon, Kyrano. Thanks again."

The call ends abruptly, with no goodbye, no dismissal. It's to his eldest son's credit that there'd been no tremor in his voice, that he didn't sound resigned or defeated or anything but matter-of-fact. It's possible that this makes things worse and though he's got Lee's hand on his shoulder and Kyrano's eyes fixed upon his face, Jeff remains perfectly neutral, as poised as is possible to be in a scenario like this, and wishes he could ask to hear the message again. But it's another voice that speaks, instead.

"They're quite convinced you're dead."

The woman in the dark was a girl when he last knew her, but it's her own father's place she's stepped into, just as she steps into the light now. Penelope's shed the petals of the demure English rose, and as far as Jefferson Tracy is concerned, she has nothing left but thorns. Her voice is cool, detached, as she continues, "Have no illusions on that front; whatever they might've done for the sake of hope, or otherwise. Really all they've hoped for is wreckage, but every chance I've had to speak with Scott or John privately—no, they're both quite certain that you were killed in the initial crash. I think it's been months already since they've stopped hoping for a body. It's good that they've given up."

There's a correction required on that point. "My boys don't give up. And they weren't wrong to keep looking."

Her eyes gleam slightly, though the lights are still low. Across the room, Kyrano shifts against the wall he leans against. It's three in the morning in Tokyo, Tracy Island's midnight. They've waited six months to the day of their father's disappearance. As far as Jeff's concerned, they've done due diligence. "Until you set your mistakes right, you'd best pray they haven't a scrap of hope left. There can be no sight of you anywhere, no glimpse of your face, no secret message of your survival—any hint that you're alive, and they'll be leveraged against you. Their ignorance protects them."

"Six months stuck in a goddamn box in Japan, we _know_ what's at stake, Lady Penelope." Lee's fingers tighten, and it's his upbringing that prevents him from bristling on Jeff's behalf; from upbraiding a woman less than half his age for her callousness, for the way she's determined to speak to her elder and her employer. "You maybe wanna—"

"It's fine, Lee." Jeff doesn't blame her, can't fault her for her anger. A year ago, the Lord Hugh Creighton-Ward dissolved out of public life, leaving his daughter in the spotlight, to make excuses for his health and to fill every role he'd left vacant. Jeff's been told—coldly and with Penelope's eyes like ice as she'd said it—that her father hasn't left the manor in an entire year. That he's never out of sight of his panic room door. That he's been tipped over the edge of fairly reasonable caution into robust, unshakable paranoia.

It doesn't need to be said that Penelope knows who's to blame, because this is all still fresh enough that there's loathing in her eyes when she takes her seat across from Jeff. There's a duality to her, and for all her hatred towards their father, Jeff knows she's got nothing against his boys. If she derives any vindictive pleasure from _his_ separation from his family, she takes none in their grief. It's that duality that has her agreeing to the contract he's proposed. "What now, Penelope?"

She shrugs and her manicured fingertips drum on the tabletop. "It's all going hinge on how effective _you_ are, acting as your own agent, separate entirely from your money and your resources and your identity. You've hung your sword by a tenuous thread. The only advantage you have is that you're the only who knows _where_."

It's by the grace of Jeff's savvy as a businessman and by the trust the GDF had placed in him that this is possible. Heavenward, as a project, had been split into so many fragments and pieces within Tracy Industries that no one had a complete picture of just what it entailed. Buried in bureaucracy and obfuscated by layer upon layer of management, whatever the project actually _was_ was just never questioned. It was always the responsibility of some other department, always something to point out to management and have kicked up the chain.

Kyrano clears his throat. "It's the _what_ that's the problem. Belah is combing the skies. He's moving his funds around, putting money into subsidiaries that have been dormant since the war. With you out of the picture, he's had no choice but to take a manual approach to the problem. I'll throw up every roadblock I can, but he's a hound with a scent. He knows what he wants and he _will not stop_."

It had been a mistake to try and find a shortcut through to the heart of the problem, and Jeff knows that now. Hugh had known it _then_ , and it had been Jeff's own hubris that led the whole thing to come unraveled, even as Belah Gaat had woven his way deeper and deeper into his partner's confidences. His curious blend of charisma, magnetism—the fact that his resources were deeper and more potent than they'd ever first appeared—driving Hugh away had been the first move in a campaign that had gotten dark and dirty, and it had only been Kyrano's insistent involvement that had kept Gaat from brute forcing his way into control of the satellite.

Jeff had been given just enough warning to shut the thing down, to disconnect it from all external systems and to render the satellite dead in orbit, already disguised from all but the most sophisticated sensors, and all but impossible to find.

It's inventory had been nearly finished, a near complete index of the contents of low earth orbit. Every defunct orbital mine, every weaponized satellite, every unwise impulse to arms littering the skies. All within the neatly ordered databank aboard Heavenward, awaiting the necessary software to take control and override the controls of every item on the list.

If he were willing to burn the project to the ground, things would be different. That had been Kyrano's initial instruction, blunt, simple, straightforward. Jeff had refused. If he could bring himself to sacrifice four years worth of work and _billions_ of dollars and the chance to sweep the skies clean—well, then he wouldn't have had to spend the past six months in a safe house in Tokyo, pretending to be a dead man.

Jeff's hands rest on the tabletop. "If he's looking for Heavenward, then he's not looking for _me_. And he _will not_ find it. From Earth, she's a needle in a haystack. From orbit she looks like just another piece of space junk. She's a ghost of a station, scanners don't see her, she's TI's best kept secret, and I had all record of her orbital path scrubbed. I know it, and I've told no one else."

"Mmhm." Penelope remains resolutely unimpressed. "You propose to strike out into the world and find your solution—the brain to go with the body, the software you failed to develop in time for the hardware—tell me, even if I had the remotest faith in your success, at what point am I meant to assume that you were just as wrong about the Hood's capabilities now as you were _then_?"

It's Penelope who'll be his single point of contact as he proceeds into self-exile. Lee and Kyrano will both go back to their lives, to keep his secret and to be called upon if needed, but it's Penelope who's going to hold him accountable, who's going to be his only connection to the life he's left behind. Though he doesn't begrudge the Lady her anger, he wonders if the edges of it will ever start to dull; if she'll ever forgive him for the collateral damage done to her father. If he's honest, part of him hopes not.

"You won't hear much from me," he tells her, and lifts his eyes to lock with hers across the table. "What I need to solve this problem is—it's on the fringes of what's possible. Not unattainable, but it's going to be challenging. It might be the work of years, yet. I don't know. But it's also going to put me into contact with the Hood's type of people. I'm going to take risks. I've insulated my family from the consequences of my actions, but there's the world at large to think about. If you ever go as long as a year without contact, then you'll do what we discussed."

Even as he avoids saying it, Penelope leans forward and he knows she'll force the issue. "What we discussed," she echoes, prompting, almost taunting him with the necessity to put it into words. It hadn't been her idea, but she'd agreed, almost immediately and with more relish than he could ever expected from the girl she'd been. That, perhaps, is the worst part of what happened to Hugh—what's happened to his daughter by proxy.

"You'll kill him."

And across the table, the Lady smiles. "Yes," she agrees. "And I do look forward to the year I don't hear from you, Mr. Tracy. I hope you're the one to make me a murderer."

* * *

Six months and eight hours to the day of Dad's crash, and John's pretty sure this is one of the stupidest things he's ever done. Pretty sure that this entire mess is all his fault, and what's worst of all is that he's just not going to be able to show it. John's not much for most poetry, but at the moment _the only way out is through_ keeps repeating itself, over and over and over in his head.

So he hadn't been able to stand it, sitting in the dark with the rest of his brothers, a few minutes past midnight. Scott had still had his phone in one hand, head bowed against clenched fists, elbows resting on his knees. Virgil had pulled himself up to sit cross-legged on the couch, hunched his shoulders and said nothing. Gordon with bright, red-rimmed eyes, still sniffing but also still bristling into furious temper any time anyone so much as looked at him. And Alan, flat on his back on the floor, staring at the ceiling and the stars passing overhead, not even crying properly, just letting tears run out of his eyes and into the blue of the carpet.

And John hadn't _meant_ to be theatrical, he really hadn't, hadn't meant it to be a profound or meaningful act, he just hadn't been able to sit still any longer, numb and not knowing how to feel. Crossing the room, bringing the central console to life and spinning his fingers across the globe. He'd pulled up weather patterns, pretended like he hadn't been keeping half an eye on what was going on worldwide anyway, and he'd brought his hands to rest just above the eastern coast of the United States and said, "A hurricane's just made landfall in the gulf."

John doesn't really remember what had spilled out of him afterward—whether it had been at all inspirational or even remotely coherent—just remembers saying that maybe they'd all feel better if they went and did some good. Got back to work, to _real_ work, to making themselves useful. Filled their heads and their hands and their hearts with what Dad would have wanted, what had always made their father proud.

Truthfully, John wonders if he'd maybe just wanted an out of his own, an excuse to stop sitting around in a choking, cloying miasma of grief. If Scott had given him a _look_ and said "Not _now_ , John", then he probably would've just left anyway and been secure in the awareness that no one would stop him. Back up to TB5, back into orbit, to figure out his own way to deal with the fact that their father was gone, and that they had to stop looking for him.

It's an exercise in mental contortion to tell himself that this is better, because he's got Virgil and Gordon sniping at each other over one set of comms, Scott dogging Alan's every move and second guessing every last one of his actions at the same time that he's trying to do _John_ _'s_ job, and manage the scope of a scenario he can only apprehend in fractions. It's hurricane season, and Hurricane Stanley is this year's latest and fiercest, and has torn a wide swath up the Florida coast.

There's a big red button in the commsphere, only it's not actually a button at all, but a holographic rendering of the override command, the means to mute everyone else's comms and bull through with his own orders. Dad had almost never used it. Dad had never needed to, because when dad had been in charge, it would have been unthinkable that the five of them could've been sat in the middle of a hurricane off the gulf coast, burning fuel and squabbling.

John has to steel himself before he reaches out and activates the override.

It's not Dad's voice he summons up, but his own. It's a new-ish voice, one he's not used to using, certainly not one he's used to having _listened_ to. But then, it had been Dad who'd told him that he needed to stop being so damn timid about really giving orders. So maybe there's a little bit of Dad talking when he says, "All of you, _quiet_. Clear all channels, _now_."

The response is radio silence, because his hand hasn't left the override, but they've all heard him, and they've all shut up.

"Thunderbird 1, I need you to pull back, get higher and back out over the water. Alan's fine, I've got an eye on him. He's patching up auxiliary dikes and he's well out of range of the storm surge. Thunderbird 4 needs you spotting for him while he cleans up the harbour. And Gordon; listen up—you _need_ to stop leaning so hard on my scanners, there's still too much movement from the storm and I can't guarantee an up to the minute read. Listen to Scott and trust your instincts. You're okay. Thunderbird 2, there's a hospital north of your position that needs help with evac, their generator's failed and the storm surge has cut off their route in-land. I'll get back to you when you're in range and help you coordinate with ground crews."

That's the sort of thing that Dad had always said. And besides that, it's just what they all need to _do_. It's just the same thing John's always said, only now he's not handing his read on a situation down to Dad's command center on the island. John's done his best approximation of the tone of their father's orders, but he's still a little reluctant to take his hand off the override. Afraid that all he's going to get back is the same cacophony, the same disorder; afraid that he's let them all down, and that he's rushed everyone back into this, thrown them into howling wind and raging waters, just because he couldn't handle the silent stillness of grief. Afraid he'll only ever be a pale imitation, washed out in his father's shadow.

His fingers drift backward and the override clears, the channel goes green.

And it's Alan who pipes up first, eager and puppyish and just glad that he'd been allowed to come along, even if he's stuck in a pod and not doing anything more interesting than just shoving wet sand around.

"FAB, John!" Bright and confident, good old Alan.

Scott clears his throat and John watches him peel off from where he's been sitting in Alan's airspace. "Roger. Uh, FAB. Gordon, sit tight."

TB4 comes to a stop just outside the harbour where Gordon's meant to clear a path for a GDF clean up crew to land. "Gotcha, Thunderbird 1, standing by. Sorry, John, I'll stop—"

"You're okay, Gordon. Thunderbird 2, you need a heading?"

Virgil's already started to bring TB2 around, coordinates for the city up the coast already on his radar. "No, I've got it. Thanks, Thunderbird 5, let them know I'm en route."

"FAB, guys. Good job."

Order bleeds back into their operations, surety overcomes doubt. If they're all going to lean a little harder on him than they have before, well, that's fine. John can handle that. It'll be necessary, probably, for him to learn how to take a more thorough command of whatever situation they run into, now that they're really and truly striking out on their own. That's fine. He'll be fine, and so will they. And for the moment, at least, John's sure they're all glad he's back up on Five.

He's less certain that they'll be glad when he tells them he's not sure if he plans to come back down.


	8. whirls and eddies of self-doubt

**\- 2058 -**

It had all fallen apart in April. April was a month of ashes, a month that burnt up all the work of the year that came before it and had taken one of Jeff's latest assumed identities along with it. Not, particularly, that Jeff had been sorry to see it go. For all his nearness to success, Jackson Gregory Turner had made mistakes. The worst sort of hubris, the sort that hadn't cost _him_ anything, but had ruined the lives of people who'd had the bad luck to be useful to him. Mistakes that have etched themselves into his features; lines of worry creasing his forehead, crinkling the corners of his eyes, carving lines from a mouth that no longer smiles easily or often.

Or maybe he's just getting old.

To date, since the six months he spent pretending not to exist, he's become the benefactor of a handful of small, ambitious little tech firms. Parallel processing, all working separately towards the same goal. All on the bleeding edge of the latest developments, and all in ambiguously legal territory as far as their mandates go.

And all desperate enough not to ask to many questions about where the money comes from, or about just what it is they're being asked to develop.

He feels his age in the conviction that this shouldn't be _that_ hard, but every time he lays out the problem, he gets blank, daunted stares from around the room. All these earnest young people, all these bright eyes and big promises, but at the end of the day, Jeff's still made to feel as though he's asking for the moon.

The small collective of developers that he'd backed as Turner had come the closest. That, as it turns out, might be the problem. The closer he gets, the greater the risks.

Because it turns out there's an upper threshold of complexity in computing. It turns out that once you start needing a program to do what Jeff needs done, it starts to toe an ethical, moral, _legal_ line. Jeff (rather, Jordan and Jeremy and Josiah and lately Jasper, but no longer Jackson) needs a custom piece of software. He needs something smart enough to identify, overtake, and completely shut down over a thousand target systems, all blockaded up in various levels of military encryption, all in one fell swoop.

The problem isn't the hardware. The hardware exists, falling silently and secretly through orbit at five miles a second, and Jeff's always quick to reassure his little pockets full of computer geeks that yes, this technology exists; yes, he has access to it; and yes, if they can create a framework to demonstrate the workability of their software, he'll be able to put it in action. And yes, they'll get to see.

The problem _seems_ to be that once software starts to increase into this level of complexity, it starts to require resources that are beyond the bounds of general availability.

As far as Jefferson Tracy was considered, the general availability of anything was just _anything_ , generally. There wasn't much he couldn't acquire at need, wasn't much in the world that was more than a phone call or two away; maybe a flight out for a personal meeting at a stretch.

But he's no longer the sort of person whose place is at the head of a long, glossy black table in a boardroom that towers above Manhattan or LA, no longer has a hierarchy of hundreds of people below him. At his best and most successful, at the closest he'd come to achieving what he was after—as Turner, he'd had six software engineers, half his age at most, in a rented office in an Indianapolis suburb, fluorescent light and flies buzzing around a room cast all in gray and fitted with industrial plastic and particle board, a broken coffee-maker leftover from previous occupants, and a flickering smartboard, covered with code he couldn't read.

And a room full of people who cowered and quailed beneath his stare, and didn't want to tell him anything he didn't want to hear.

And he'd been told that in order to progress, his team was going to need to start pirating extant software. That what necessary for this level of complexity was the property and provenance of the sort of companies that did the programming for governments and militaries.

And maybe what they'd really been asking was for him to call the whole thing off. Maybe he'd been wrong to tell them to go ahead, that he'd cover for them, that whatever they needed to do had his sanction. Maybe it was the force of his own personality that had pushed them over a line that they wouldn't have crossed on their own. Maybe he'd expected more from them than what they were capable of. Maybe he should have known the sort of attention they'd draw; that a handful of software developers transplanted from around the country into the American Midwest wouldn't be the sort of people who even _could_ steal complex, proprietary software from assorted sources.

But then, April.

Because of course they'd been caught. It was a contingency Jeff had always been prepared for and he'd done what was necessary to ensure that whatever they had to say about him would lead a long trail back to an identity that didn't exist, that he could burn at a moment's notice and leave behind. He'd told himself, even leaving half a dozen people who'd trusted and depended on them to the mercy of a GDF Cyber Security unit, that once he'd solved the problem, he'd go back and make it right. That once he'd achieved his goal and rendered his service and been restored to his life and his family and his fortune and his empire—that he'd swoop back in and rebuild the lives he'd been so quick to ruin.

So May rises from April's ashes, and he's Japser Gibbson-Thorne. If he's started again from nothing—well, at least it's less nothing that a brand new man of lesser means would be starting with. His equivalent of starting from scratch starts from a private trust fund, and is bankrolled to the toon of a cool ten million in international currency. Pocket change, compared to what he's used to working with, but what he means to do with it isn't _supposed_ to be expensive.

He hadn't _thought so_ , anyway, but then, maybe he really _is_ getting old. Maybe an innovator's mind isn't enough without an innovator's money, maybe the question he keeps posing to all these fringey little startups isn't one that they'll ever have the resources to answer.

Now, at least, he knows that he's going to need a different class of programmer. The earnest young kids he's been pulling for graduating classes across the country—they're all clever and skilled and passionate, but none of them hope for anything bigger or grander than developing a new operating system or video game. As well as he's talked up his project and as well as they've all understood its potential—none of them had ever seen it as more than something to put on a resume.

As Jasper Gibbson-Thorne, he makes the choice to cut them all loose. Sincerely, apologetically, and for their own good, he reaches out to his scattered handful of development teams (As Jordon and Jeremy and Josiah) and tells them to close up shop. That the funds have dried up and he's going to need to move on. He takes what work they've done and squirrels it away for future prospects, and if it's a cruel thing to do, well, it's better than the potential of landing them all in jail.

He needs people who can be made aware of the risks, up front, and who'll proceed in spite of that awareness. Better still, people who'll proceed _because_ of it.

As far as programmers go, his are going to need hats of a darker colour.

* * *

John's the one making this call, not because Scott had refused to, but because Scott had known better. Had been afraid (not wrongly) that from the eldest it would have the tone of an order; that telling Gordon anything from a position of authority is liable to make him dig his heels in, put his head down, and shout "NO" at the top of his lungs.

John's not sure if he's less or more of an authority figure than Scott, these days. But it needs to be done and if he's got better odds than Scott, he might as well at least try. So at the end of his own day, John settles down on his bunk, adjusts the small portable holocomm he's grabbed, and calls Gordon.

If he's honest, part of him hopes that his little brother won't answer. John's privately certain that a call from TB5 during Gordon's time off is going to tip his hand, going to give the whole game away before he's even had a chance to say anything (not, actually, that he knows what he's going to say). As far as Gordon's concerned, sometimes any sufficiently advanced emotional intuition is indistinguishable from magic, at least as far as what John can apprehend.

But then, the call's also going from TB5 down to TB4, and not, strictly speaking, from John to Gordon. So maybe that's why Gordon picks up.

"Hey, Thunderbird 5. 'Sup?"

Gordon's in the North Atlantic again, is what's up. Gordon's supposed to be taking three days off, supposed to be using his time to sleep and decompress and be fresh and ready for the next two weeks on rotation. Instead, he's taken TB4, pointed her towards the Panama Canal, and burned time and energy and money and his own personal reserves of energy, getting himself to the coordinates he's had inked between his thumb and forefinger.

John clears his throat, "Yeah, hi." He hopes that the deliberate absence of a call-sign makes it clear that this is a personal call.

"How're the skies treating you, Jaybird?" He can't tell if Gordon doesn't take the hint, or just ignores it. It's immeasurably frustrating to try and outmaneuver by analysis what Gordon does by instinct. John always gets trapped in whirls and eddies of self-doubt. His little brother's avatar reaches up to flick and fiddle with switches, sonar beeping softly in the background, as he continues, blithe, "If it's about the weather, I know already, I've got an eye on it. I'm still operating at depth, it shouldn't be a problem unless I have to surface. WASP has a research center off the Grand Banks, they know I'm here. I'll give 'em a shout if I need 'em, but I won't need 'em."

This already feels like it's started poorly. "No, not about the weather. Just...thought I'd call. Wanted to say hi." Everything he says feels lame, transparent. Against his instincts, he tacks on what seems like a white lie, "Grandma said I should try and call more often."

It's the sort of thing that Grandma probably _would_ say, but _hasn't_ said, because John's maybe had a total of three conversations with Grandma over the past month, and all of them incidental. He could probably count the words they've exchanged off on his fingertips, "oh, hi, yeah, fine, you?, thanks, good, talk later."

"Love you too."

So fingertips and a toe.

There's a beat of silence. "Oh, so you called Grandma?"

There's the slightest stress of emphasis on the word _you_ , enough to read irritation and contempt and judgment, and enough for John to wish he had a button to reset the conversation. He considers dropping the call, and then calling back after a few minutes have passed considers pretending it was some technical error, except his comms are the absolute pinnacle of what's available in orbit, and dropped calls just _don't happen_.

This was a bad strategy. John feels the warmth of blood in his cheeks, embarrassed and wondering if Gordon's caught him in a lie or if he's projecting his own guilt into Gordon's voice, or if he's about to shoot himself in the foot by backpedaling immediately into the truth-but he can't leave too long a silence, backpedals anyway. "No, I guess I didn't."

"What d'you _want_ , John?"

There's no point in trying to pretend around it, nothing is going to soften any of what he knows he needs to say. John tells himself he's doing Scott a favour. Tells himself that this is actually probably the best possible version of this encounter. That Gordon, alone and in a little bubble of air and metal and silence is better than Gordon, loose on the island, pulling people into this argument like a riptide. So he sighs and hopes he doesn't sound exasperated or condescending or anything else that'll get his brother's back up, and asks the question.

"Gordon, what are you doing?"

"I'm running a bathymetric survey for NOAA," Gordon answers, flat and deliberate. There's no anger, not yet, only very deliberate ignorance of what's actually being asked. "I've got some of the best 4D scanners in the world, and the resolution on their maps of this region is less than the standard. Figured I'd donate my time. You got a problem, John?"

"You know that's not what I mean." This, so far, is the only thing John's been sure of saying.

The danger with asking sharp questions of Gordon is that Gordon reaches up and puts his hand around the blade, doesn't care about what gets cut open in the process. He'll turn the edge right back on whoever's asking, and John can't help but wince at every incision.

"Are you only asking because Scott put you up to it?"

The _only_ stings. If it's a knife-edged question, then the _only_ is the point of the blade. The answer shouldn't be yes. "No."

Still the wrong answer, because Gordon scoffs at him, and knows it for another lie, "Like fuck you're not. Scott's put _you_ up to this, and that's just too fucking rich, right? D'you see the irony there, Johnny? On account of how _you've_ been in orbit for the past eight months, and we're all just not talking about that?"

"I'm doing my job."

"Yeah, and I'm doing _mine_."

"Gordon, we _stopped_. You agreed, when we stopped, that it was because we _had_ to stop. It was taking too much out of us, out of _all_ of us, and not just...not just in the technical sense." John's got numbers on his side, and knows it. John's got hard data about just how much money and time and effort Gordon's bleeding out of IR. John can point to operating costs and regulatory requirements for pilot downtime to all the additional maintenance that TB4's going to require. He can make this about what Gordon is going to cost _other_ people-living, breathing, _needing_ people-who'll suffer if he's not at his best...but it seems cruel. It seems like trying to cut through his brother's grief with something as cold and clinical as _math_ would be inhuman. Would be the sort of thing Gordon would expect and then throw right back at him.

"Oh, _we agreed_ ," Gordon mimics right back, sneering now. "Uh huh, because the terms of that agreement included all _your_ bullshit. Say, John. Hey. You think maybe this isn't actually about _me_? You wonder why Scott asked _you_ to try and sit me down for a talk, instead of Virgil?"

John hadn't, actually. John's _going_ to, now. What's meant to be _his_ six hours of downtime is now going to be spent staring at his ceiling, wondering what's being said about him on the island, out of his hearing. Because if Scott would ask him to talk to Gordon, then it follows that Scott thinks about people who need talking to. Scott's always been a big fan of hitting two birds with one stone. "This isn't about-"

"Bullshit." Gordon snaps, now, and snarls, "There's only _one thing_ that anything is _ever_ about, anymore, John. One fucking thing, and you _don't_ get to pretend that just because no one ever sees you to prove it, that you're not still just as fucked up about Dad as I am."

Maybe this was actually the worst place for this encounter to happen. Maybe Gordon, alone, in a tiny bubble of air and metal, scouring the ocean floor for some tiny scrap or fragment of closure, trying to find a body that just _can't_ possibly be there any longer-maybe whatever John's reasons were or weren't for making this call; the fact of the matter is, he just shouldn't have made it. His voice wavers, betrays him, when he tries to find something to say, "Gordon, I-"

" _No_. And fuck you and fuck off, John. If you ever really wanna talk to me? If you ever get up the guts to actually do it yourself and not because Scott _made_ you? You'll do it to my face. Not from however the fuck many miles in orbit."

High above the North Atlantic, from the best comms in orbit, the call drops.


	9. a goddamned fool, is what he is

**\- 2059 -**

He likes the German house. Doesn't like it enough to die on its kitchen floor, but likes it all the same.

Jeff's not going to die on the kitchen floor. Probably. If he's going to die at all, he thinks, he'd rather die in the living room, so he's sort of half-scooted half-crawled himself most of the way through the dining room, with an eye fixed on the sideboard, where he knows there's a bottle of scotch. Currently this is the goal. Currently this is the only goal he's got the remotest chance to achieve, and even then, he's only halfway there.

A goddamned fool, is what he is. An old, broken fool who'd overplayed his hand and trusted the wrong people. Time and time again he trusts the wrong people.

The wrong people have, in this case, divulged his continued existence to the worst person possible. It turns out that when you involve yourself with people who gleefully flaunt the law, they tend to be the sort of people whose loyalties can be swayed. It turns out that these sorts of people will sell you to the highest bidder, and that the highest bidder will have his thugs crash their way into the heart of your latest endeavour, and bullets will fly, and you'll get shot.

It's very annoying, having been shot. Kyrano's the reason he's still alive _at all_ , the reason he'd caught a bullet in the hip instead of the back, the reason he's currently sitting on the floor of the German safehouse, bullet wound hastily packed and bandaged, and awaiting Kyrano's return with a doctor.

And the sideboard is beginning to seem like a sideboard too far. Jeff's reasonably sure he's not _actually_ going to die, but he's left a smeared and smudged trail of blood out from around where he'd been left sitting on the floor in the kitchen after Kyrano had flushed blood and debris from the wound and packed it with clean towels.

So he's made as far as the dining room, halfway there, before he lets himself slump to the floor, where he feels every last one of his fifty-nine years, and then some.

He lies on the hardwood and wonders about hubris.

There has to be some equilibrium between his motives and his actions; has to be some way to tell at what point he'd crossed the Rubicon with regard to this damned project. If he's passed his point of no return, he's not sure how he missed the transition. But then, perhaps _this_ is it, perhaps _this_ is how he's meant to tell.

Jeff's tired.

And this place is too much like home.

It was a mistake, maybe, to have pulled all those same influences together, at all these different points across the globe. All the clean lines and sharp angles, all the blonde wood and brushed stainless steel, all the poured concrete and clear glass. It's all too familiar, and bittersweet.

If he closes his eyes, drowses in the spaces between throbbing pain and blood loss, he can imagine it in daylight. He can imagine the sun over the Southern Pacific and that any minute now he'll start to hear life stirring around him, start to hear all the voices he hasn't heard in far too long.

He misses his boys.

There's the urge to summon up his memories of them, to unpack all the bits and pieces of news he's had, secondhand and in fits and spurts, from Lady Penelope. But he doesn't know if he can summon the energy. Whatever she can be bothered to mention, during her brief points of contact, fitful and sporadic as they are, these days. She's uninterested in hearing from him unless he's made progress, and there's been precious little of that.

His last thought, fading out of him, is that maybe it's time to let the year go by.

Kyrano's not being gentle when Jeff muddles his way back to awareness. His hands are brusque, tending to the numbly painful place above Jeff's hip. He speaks in gruff, clipped German, addressing someone else. Jeff draws a hissing breath through his teeth as something digs into his side.

"You were lucky," his bodyguard tells him, though it doesn't feel true. He doesn't answer, because to be told that he's lucky to be lying on the floor of some foreign facsimile of his home in a country on the other side of the world; to be without his family and foiled time and time again in his purpose; to be told that he's lucky to be alive, when it's starting to seem as though the fail safe of his death might be more valuable—

He's patched up and put to bed and given painkillers, drugs that let him sleep, and give him an excuse for the numbness, the weariness, though not the regret.

Admittedly, the regret is new.

And in the morning, stirring from beneath the blankets of the bed where he'd been deposited, the pain and the regret are both equally fresh and equally present. Jefferson Tracy is not meant to be a man who has regrets. He's meant to be a man of ambition and ideals, and the ambition upon which he'd founded this whole endeavour still seems so noble, still seems like a cause worth everything he's given to it.

It's possible he just hasn't got anything left. Lying in bed, staring at a paneled ceiling in the dim of pre-daylight, Jeff finds he has to think about it, has to count his way back through the years to come up with an appropriate total.

Seven years is a long time. Seven years represents a lot of failure.

Especially when his absence has left a legacy of heroism and selflessness and _success_ , when his boys have all gone and grown up and grown into themselves, and into the roles he'd left behind for them. When the family name remains untainted by his mistakes, by his inability to achieve that secret, lofty ambition; that desire to clear the skies and make the world a safer place for his sons. The aim that tarnishes, year after year, month after month, and seems like it was always a fool's goal.

This is all on _top_ of the fact that he's been shot, and he's been shot by associates of a man who'll be happier than anyone to learn that he's still alive.

That's not a problem Jeff can solve any longer. The Hood is a sinister, shadowy figure who looms large in the landscape of the criminal underworld, and now he _knows_ that Jeff's alive. If word hasn't reached him by now, it's going to, and the game is up. Now, Jeff will see figures in every shadow, he'll never again be sure of who he can trust. The facts of the matter regarding the darkness and the depth of the criminal underworld are facts that Jeff had never actually been adequately prepared for.

If he weren't so aware of the fall of light in the room, he probably wouldn't have perceived Kyrano's shadow, darkening the doorway. It's alarming, now, just how closely he reflects his brother. In more than just appearance; in manner and in bearing. There's something powerful in him, and dark, and terrible, and Jeff shifts painfully against the soft mattress, pushes himself to sit up in his presence. Kyrano makes no move to help, and Jeff's put in mind of Parker in moments like these, and of Hugh. There's a deep love between Parker and Hugh, breaking up through a bedrock of trust and partnership, flourishing.

Whenever Jeff manages to meet Kyrano's gaze, it's all he can do not to cringe at the way he feels hated.

Maybe it's time for some humility. He's certainly been humbled. After the degree of failure he's put himself through up to now, maybe he deserves a small and modest goal.

Getting Kyrano to quit looking at him as though he's the stupidest man who ever lived still seems like more of a mountain than a molehill, but it's as good a place to start as any.

So.

"Thank you," he starts, surprised at how gravelly and gruff his voice has gotten in sleep. Jeff clears his throat with a grind of breath in the back of his throat and sighs. "Kyrano, for last night. I can't recall if I thanked you."

"You pay me not to need to be thanked."

Jeff winces, and pretends that it's the pain in his side that's why. "Is that the kind of man I am?"

Kyrano shrugs, as though he neither knows nor cares. He hasn't moved from the doorway, and Jeff wonders if there was something he came to say. Probably. It might be self-centered to try and speak his piece before Kyrano can say anything, but he doesn't especially care. One last vestige of selfishness. He tries again, "I'm sorry," he says, and means it. Maybe it's necessary to be old and tired and hurt and humbled, to be able to be really sorry. "And I know I've never told you I'm sorry, because I haven't been. I've been arrogant and a fool. I went behind your back and thought I knew better than what you'd told me."

"Yes."

"Is this salvageable? This whole endeavour, do you think there's any way I could possibly see it through?"

"I don't know." It's a better answer than Jeff could have hoped for, actually. And, surprisingly, Kyrano chuckles, though it's still a cold, mechanical sound with no warmth or heart behind it. "You've barely even been shot, old man. I'd have shot you myself, and far sooner, if I'd known it'd have you tasting crow."

"You're only two years younger than I am."

"And yet _somehow_ infinitely the wiser."

Jeff chuckles weakly at that. "Yes." There's something new and different in the room now, some newly opened channel and the beginnings of something flowing between them. Some new and novel sense of give and take. It's too early to tell, but Jeff finds himself thinking about Parker and Hugh, and what they have in one another, each a partner, a friend. It's far too early even to hope, and yet— "Is it too late to ask you to help me? As a broken old fool?"

"Perhaps not." A beat, and within the space of it Kyrano seems to look at him just a little differently. Just enough for one more moment of hope. And then, charitably, "You're a fool with noble intentions, at least."

If he really were dying and needed to pick an epitaph, an engraved rendering regarding the road to hell and the relative goodness of one's intentions seems as though it would be pertinent. But humility is the penitent's path, so Jeff's uncharacteristically meek as he asks, "What do you think I should I do now?"

The sun's all the way up now, and the light from the windowed hallway frames the man on the threshold. "Now? For now you need to lie low. Captain Taylor's making arrangements. Contact Lady Penelope, and tell her you'll be out of the world for a while. It's time to set a deadline."

Kyrano's wise enough that the choice of the word was probably deliberate and it's enough to darken the daylight behind him. The sort of deadline that Jeff Tracy's set is the sort that will leave someone dead at its expiry.

In spite of everything, Jeff's hopes not to be the kind of man who'd want that.

* * *

John waits until his brothers are in bed, or at least otherwise absent, before he makes this call.

It's not that it's a secret, or anyway, not that it's a secret he keeps because he thinks it's wrong or shameful or that his reasons aren't good reasons. It's more of a secret of privacy, of prudence. Something personal, and John's reasonably sure that his brothers think he just doesn't _have_ a personal life any longer. He'd rather not let them suffer the shock.

It's possible they know, anyhow, because the thing about this particular secret is that it's kept between two people, and he's never actually _said_ it's a secret, and the other party is certainly under no obligation to keep it under wraps. Maybe she just knows. Grandmas are good at that.

So it's late on the island, when he puts in a call to his grandmother's private comm. As far as he's aware, about ninety percent of the other traffic to this particular device is from Grandma's old school friends, or the occasional phone psychic, once in a while. And John, the rest of the time, the only one of his brothers who'd need to call her.

And she always expects him, because she knows what he waits for—for the absence of the rest of the family, for there to be no one around who'd catch him doing anything so human as just wanting to talk to Grandma.

"Hi there, Johnnycake."

She's not as bad with tech as she pretends to be, or at least, she's pretty good with comms. Sometimes she puts on a bit of a show in front of the rest of the family, looks in the wrong place or turns her back entirely, enough that John suspects it might be a private joke for his own benefit. On her personal line, she rarely goofs around. Her room is warm and softly lit, and she's always set up at the vanity beyond the end of her bed, with the lights all set up quite correctly, so her image is bright and clear and crisp, even if she's translucent, blue, and far away.

"Hey, Grandma."

John's day ends in his bunk, too, though this call always makes his world feel so bare and empty, spartan. He sits cross-legged on his bed, pulled against it by the spin of the gravity ring, watching the world turn slowly beneath him, and waiting for the dawn to catch up with him.

"How's tricks, kiddo?" Her eyes crinkle as she looks him up and down, and he always wonders if he'd be just as closely appraised in person as he is at distance. "Long day," she comments, gently, observing and not asking, because they both know it has been.

"Yeah, it was. I'm fine."

"Which sort of fine?"

The sad-but-don't-know-how-to-say-so sort of fine. The did-everyone-work-harder-than-usual-because-they- _wanted_ -to-or-because-I- _made-them sort of fine. Fine-because-everyone-needs_ -me-to-be-fine.

The Father's Day sort of fine.

The not-actually-really-fine-at-all sort of fine.

John's lucky that Grandma knows to ask, and luckier still that she can read the answer in the way he shrugs, and doesn't.

Gordon gets it from Grandma, that incredible emotional intuition. John knows that it's a complex blend of body language and tone of voice and subconscious tells and pure psychology. He's had reason to learn all the tips and tricks, and he's put them all into action and he knows that they work. It's a valuable skill, being able to hear past the panic in the voice of someone who needs him, or ferret out the lie from someone who might not want to disclose information _he_ needs. John's good at it, but he's good at it because given enough time, he can get good at anything that comes out of a textbook or a manual.

Grandma's good at it because she's a Grandma, and she's better at it than John will ever be.

"Hey now, Johnny."

Her smile is sad when he manages to look up, not sure what he hopes she might say. "I'm fine, too," she tells him, in that way that lets him know that no, not really. No, she isn't either, because how could she be?

And that that's okay.

"Did I push everybody too hard, today?" he wants to know, and trusts her not just to placate him, to tell him that of course he hadn't.

"I don't think so. I think they all hoped you would have something to fill the day up. Scott would've found something, if you hadn't. Good for Virgil to have his hands full of something other than Gordon. Alan…"

John feels a hot pulse of guilt. It wasn't that he hadn't tried, but—"I didn't have anything for Alan."

"Alan was all right," Grandma answers, but carefully, in a way that indicates that there's a caveat coming. John braces himself, internally, but it still hits the same way it always does. "Days like today, Alan misses _you_ , John."

Well, of course he does.

John never knows what to say to that. "I know" seems trite, seems as though it's the worst thing he _could_ say. Knowing so, and still staying away. Knowing that his littlest brother is the only member of the family who even _gets_ to see him, once or twice a year on supply runs—and still misses him, because of course there's no way that could be good enough, for someone with a heart as big as Alan's. Alan deserves a lot better than what John's letting himself turn into.

And there's a weird sort of sense of knowing that everyone else _knows_ this, thought it goes unsaid and goes unspoken. John's not sure at what point Scott decided his absence was worth the tradeoff, because it's been over six hundred days since John's boots last touched the ground, and if John's counting, then Scott's _definitely_ counting. And Gordon knows, certainly, because John still occasionally lies awake and thinks about the things Gordon knows about him, the things they both have in common, the things he'd had thrown back in his face. And if Gordon knows, then Virgil's at least heard about it, being the immovable object to Gordon's unstoppable force. John can just imagine the devil's advocacy that must go on, on his behalf, from Virgil.

And Alan. It's been long enough that John can't remember if he was always Alan's favourite, or if it was something he became in long years of absence, because Alan's the sort of person who'd know some part of John would need to be missed.

He's still not going home, though.

"…can…could you tell him I'm sorry?" _For today, and for the past six hundred days, and for everything. For being the way I am._

And he has to hope that _she_ knows it's because she'd just know how to explain it better than he can, and not because he isn't sorry, that he doesn't know just exactly how Alan feels. But that he's still not ready, not sure how to be at home. That he can't be in the midst of everything and everyone again without feeling as lost and broken and hopeless as he should have let himself be, then.

But Grandma knows him better than that, and her smile fades, and she tells him something they both already know, "No, hon. No, you'll have to tell him that yourself."


	10. with so much going on around me

**\- 2060 -**

It's half a year since they'd first returned to Shadow-Alpha-1. Even back then, the first time around, Lee had done most of the work. Mostly because Jeff had been nursing a bullet wound and in an overall state of desperate flight from the clutches of the criminal underworld. If Lee had seemed suspiciously well prepared at the time, Jeff hadn't thought to comment. That he'd bought and kept an old Lunar Shuttle, maintained it in near mint condition back on his small Kansas farm—well, that was just nostalgia, surely. That he'd had it fully stocked with supplies, been ready to go at remarkably short notice—Jeff had put it down to foresight, to Lee having the sense to have his back. If he'd put it down to anything, Jeff had put it down to the fact that Lee had always meant to go back.

Only six months later, and Jeff hadn't expected to hear from him, had been surprised by the message left at one of his several secret hideouts, scattered around the globe. Its contents had been short, straightforward, and brutally to the point.

Jeff had dropped everything he'd been in the midst of (not that he'd been in the midst of much) to fly to the other side of the world, rent a truck in Lawrence, Kansas, and drive out through the endless fields of wheat beneath the soaring arc of a perfect blue sky. Everything else he might've asked of Lee had been superseded by a single question, and hammering on his best friend's door on a summer afternoon, it had been like they were kids again.

Only the question hadn't been "D'you wanna come out and play?" so much as "What the fuck do you mean you've got terminal cancer?"

So Lee Taylor is determined to die on the moon.

Jeff Tracy has determined that this is a _bad idea_ , for a multitude of reasons, but when your best friend calls in his one big favour, after everything he's done, it's not like you can say no. Ever since the diagnosis, Lee had quietly started his own secret plan in motion, buying up crates full of old lunar gear, supplies, a stockpile to last out his last years of life. The amount of time and care and thought and _work_ he's put into it—it defies Jeff's ability to be furious with him for keeping such a secret.

That's really the worst of it, that there's no arguing with him. Jeff hasn't got a leg to stand on, embroiled up to his neck in his own madcap scheme, his own secrets.

But the less said about _that_ , the better.

To his credit, Jeff holds his tongue until they've passed what Lee must assume is the point of no-return. He's all support and compliance and positivity and everything he expects that Lee must expect of him, until they're sitting in the living quarters of the old abandoned moonbase, passing a flask of Kentucky Bourbon back and forth, and there's just nothing else to talk about.

"You know you can't _actually_ do this, Lee."

The old astronaut grins, like death isn't eating its way into him, like he's not going to be left hollow and empty, alone on the dark side of the Moon. He seems untroubled by the notion that his death will pass unmarked and unmourned, until Jeff manages to find some way to tell the world at large that it's been deprived of Captain Lee Goddamn (Richard) Taylor and no one's even deigned to notice.

"Can and I'm gonna, Jefferson. Surprised you ain't had to spit your tongue out on the floor, you been bitin' it since I told you."

"This is selfish."

Lee actually hoots with laughter at this, slaps his knee and all. "Hell. Oh, _hell_ , we oughta make this a damn drinkin' game. Take a shot every time you say somethin' staggeringly hypocritical. _Selfish_. Me wantin' the manner and place and time an' the death of my own choosin'. S'selfish. Hell." Lee doesn't miss a beat, taking a swig from the vacuum flask and snorting. "Tell me, Jeff, how's your boys been doin'?"

Jeff doesn't flinch at the mention of his sons. Lee might know what he's looking for, but Jeff doesn't give him the satisfaction. In fact, this is precisely the sort of statement he can turn right back around. "My boys are going to be devastated to think that you wouldn't have reached out to them, let them know about what was going on with you. _Uncle_ Lee."

"The boys oughta remember me how I was. I ain't a sad, witherin' old sack of bones to any one of 'em. Rather I kept it that way." Lee reaches across the couch, holds out the half-full flask of liquor for Jeff to take.

This isn't a conversation Jeff wants to have, isn't a reality he wants to be a part of. Here, in this place, the base that was their home for so many months, so many missions—once again, the worst of it is that Jeff can see the other side, can understand every one of the reasons why Lee would _want_ it to be here. He can even understand why he'd choose to be alone. But Lee's forced him to confront the reality of loss, and the muddied up parallel he's drawn with Jeff's own situation. It forces him to advocate for his sons, to think about just how badly he's hurt them already, and how badly Lee will hurt them again. "They'll think they should have known, should've kept in better touch with you. If you'd just reach out, they'd—hell. I know my boys. They'd be there for you. Whatever you wanted, they'd make sure you were…were comfortable, were somewhere less fucking empty and barren and _awful_ than the goddamn dark side of the moon. And they'd stay. Right 'til the end, every one of them, if it was what you wanted— _Hell_ , Lee. Don't be another person who leaves them like I did."

Of course, it's probable that Lee's already thought this through. The way he just continues to sit, still and solemn and with his feet kicked up on the coffee table—it's like Jeff's asked him who his picks are for the Super Bowl this year and he needs a minute to weigh up his considered opinion.

And true to form, Lee returns the volley with the sort of razor sharp insight that Jeff relies upon and hates him for. "See, y'know, I think that ain't actually even quite your angle, either. You know they never had a funeral for you. You just think maybe they'd put me in the ground and maybe feel a bit better 'bout the fact that poor Lucy's still all alone in a double-wide plot in Kansas. You wanna talk about _selfish_ , Jefferson, it's what you've been doin for—"

"I'm giving up." There's a beat and Jeff takes another drink before he hands the flask over and then corrects himself, "Technically, I guess I've _given_ up."

That stops Lee cold, before he can start his tirade. "What, really? How d'you mean?"

At the far end of the room, a domed bay window is halved by the stark lunar landscape, white albedo gleaming off the surface, and infinite darkness overhead. The faint glow diffuses too quickly, barely brightens the room. This place is darker than Jeff remembers. The topic of conversations seems to leech brightness from around them; it's not a subject for a brightly lit room. Light just doesn't seem to go as far, and the dead man and the dying man sit side by side in the shadows.

"I mean I'm letting the year go by. I haven't contacted Penelope since—since Munich. She knew I'd been shot, but I didn't give her any details. I just left a message with her father, and then I got in touch with you. Last she heard, _this_ is where I was, but I didn't tell her when we went back down. I've been—Kyrano and I—we're making our last efforts, but there's not a lot to go on and I don't imagine much will come of it. And if I haven't found and implemented a solution in the next six months…" Jeff trails off, shrugs. "I'm letting the year go by."

Lee was there, in Tokyo. He knows what Jeff means, and he knows Jeff well enough to know why he still steps around the truth, but this has never been a trait they have in common. So Lee translates, "You're gonna make that girl a murderer."

Jeff winces. "It was her idea. She's…it's Hugh's line of work, she took the exact same path. Presented herself to the World Council in his stead and said 'make use of me'. It's more than possible that she's a murderer already."

"Still don't seem like the sorta thing that'd sit right with you."

Maybe at one point that was true. But now, the truth is sadder, more tired, a truth that's eaten its way through the man Jeff used to be, just the way cancer's eaten its way into Lee Taylor. He shrugs. "It's the sort of thing that has to leave my hands. I've tried too hard and failed for too long, and now that he knows I'm alive—my odds weren't ever what I thought they were. And as long as—as long as he's out there, I can't see my boys again. It's gotten to the point where another man's life seems like a small price to pay."

Even 238,900 miles in orbit, in the company of one of the only people Jeff could possibly admit something like this to, it's still a truth that drops like ink into clear water. The shadows seem to grow darker still. It's lucky that the base is somewhere with so many small, myriad sounds, because otherwise the silence that falls would be unbearable. The moments between Jeff and his best friend fill with the sounds of air recirculating, of various computer systems and their various beeps and whirrs, with the liquid sound of whiskey against the empty space in the flask that crosses the couch again.

"Well," Lee says, after what seems like such a full silence, "at least he ain't a _good_ man."

Jeff chuckles, though it's a weak, weary sort of sound, the sort of strained laughed that belongs to a man who sees too much death in his future. Before the end of the year, he'll face the deaths of his best friend and his arch enemy. Somehow, Jeff's not sure which is going to be worse. "Small consolation. At the end of all of this, Lee, I'm not sure if I will be either."

* * *

Thunderbird One is currently undergoing weekly maintenance. Scott's asleep, and there's a little chart above his bed, counting down a ratio of how much sleep he's had vs how much sleep he needs, before he can be back on call. Currently this reads:

[ST1 01:15:34/10:00:00]  
[ST2 02:02:57/10:00:00]  
[ST3 00:49:23/10:00:00]  
[ST4 01:18:19/10:00:00]  
[REM 02:37:14/10:00:00]  
[SLP 08:03:17/10:00:00]

Thunderbird Two, Gordon, and Virgil are in Alaska, where a malfunction at a pump station has burst a pipeline, and is leaking oil into the tundra at a rate that has Gordon exploding every five minutes into assorted tirades about corporate irresponsibility and just how the hell something like this can happen in this day and age. The audio's off, but a transcript runs in the background, text scrolling in the segment of the commsphere that John's devoted to the mission's status

PODA[Comm1]: What I don't understand is the how the [expletive] World Council allows this entire [expletive] industry to persist in the first place. We're past this. Technologically, morally, as a [expletive] species, we are better than this. And yet I'm still freezing my [expletive] [value not found] [expletive] off, and up to my knees in [expletive] crude oil. [Expletive]!  
PODB[Comm1]: Uh huh. So Gordo, as far as the mobeius strip of your morality goes, how do you reconcile the fact that we burnt through about thirty grand worth of rocket fuel just getting out here?  
PODA[Comm1]: Not the same [expletive] thing.  
PODB[Comm1]: Yeah, right. Explain that one for me, because I'm real interested in the mental gymnastics necessary to separate our means from this end.  
PODA[Comm1]: You wanna tangle with me about relative ethics versus ecology versus International [expletive] Rescue? Ooh, Virg, I hope your [expletive]'s as numb as mine is, 'cuz I'm going to kick it to the [expletive] curb. Or I would if there were a curb available. Permafrost is gonna have to do.  
PODB[Comm1]: Bring it on, shrimptail, we've got nothing to kill but time.  
PODA[Comm1]: Yeah, and local [expletive] wildlife.

Probably for the best that John's got the comm muted. Virgil sounds like he has everything in hand, anyway.

Thunderbird Three is on standby, as ever, and Alan's in the kitchen doing his homework. John's got a copy of Alan's curriculum, has today's lessons pulled up and occasionally glances over to track Alan's progress through each module. He's meandering, dawdling and distracted, taking frequent breaks for water and snacks and the bathroom. At one point he had attempted to wander up to the lounge, but a patrolling sweep by Grandma had sent him scurrying back downstairs. There's a timer ticking down, in five minutes John will call and engage in some responsible brotherly nagging.

Thunderbird Shadow is still in its early test phases, and Kayo's putting it through its paces bouncing back and forth between Tracy Island and up and down the coast of New Zealand. John's cleared her flight path with local authorities and is keeping them posted as to her ongoing maneuvers.

Within the commsphere, his family's life is neatly ordered, manageable, and easy to apprehend.

It's funny, John knows more about his brothers and their day-to-day lives than he ever did, back before he'd quietly made the decision that TB5 was the best place he could be; the place he _belongs_. John sometimes wonders if his father ever had this same sense of intimacy, of always knowing where and when and what his brothers were doing at any given moment, and usually being responsible for the why and the how. He wonders if he fell under that same umbrella himself; if his father's radar had always had five little blips on it, moving through whatever part of the world on whatever day for whatever reason.

It's not born out of a need to control. If the reasons he has are reasons in common with his dad, then John's learning that this was a myth about his father; that he desired control above all else. Probably it's not hard to make the leap to that conclusion, but John's becoming reasonably certain that it was actually just about awareness, about connection. Dad's desk is at the very heart of the villa, and life on the island still moves around it. John knows, because at any given moment, he's got a schematic of the island up and available, and he spends enough time watching his brothers that he can see the paths they follow, reliable and predictable patterns of rote and routine.

But their father isn't there to be that universal point of contact any longer. That's fine. It's been two and a half years. John's long since taught himself that he can handle that.

He thinks he can, anyway. He's pretty sure. Almost always. Usually, even. It's just—

Some days—every day, really, but some days more than others—John feels like he _is_ Thunderbird Five, just as much as he inhabits Thunderbird Five. Truthfully, even if there's never anyone around to be honest with besides himself, John's not sure what he'd do or who he'd be if he didn't have a role to fill. His station is a world unto itself, but it's a world he made and a world he knows as intimately as he knows his own mind.

And, if John knows his ship as well as he knows himself, then it's impossible _not_ to know that there are things about Thunderbird Five that are starting to make him different, starting to make him feel like something fundamental might have changed.

It had been strange to realize that he no longer marks time as the passage of days. Units of twenty-four hours are something that belongs to the world below him, if day can be defined by the dawn, then he sees a sunrise every ninety minutes. If weeks are meant to be bounded in by weekends, well, it's not like the world keeps a schedule; not like your average earthquake cares whether it hits on a Saturday or Sunday. If the year is supposed to pass in seasons, it had been strange for John to realize that he no longer thinks in terms of summer or winter, spring or fall. Years aren't supposed to add up this quickly, even if Alan's the only one of them to be taking a thirteenth year, slotted into New Zealand's school system, and due to sit his final exams in Auckland in December. That Alan starting up his last term of school had come as a surprise, and beyond that, it makes John feel a sharp stab of disconnection, that his youngest brother is starting to want to talk about college.

None of it bears thinking about for too long. There's too much to do. As long as there's enough to do, he'll be fine.

Scott coming up on availability again, it's time for John to drift out of the commsphere and down into the gravity ring, to pull up the latest global report from his secondary command center, and see if there's anything that needs attention, anywhere Scott can be of assistance.

John skims his fingertips through global weather, but finds nothing of interest. He pulls up an overlay of major news networks, has a look through a projection of recent happenings, but none of it is the sort of thing they can get involved with. He's just pulled up the latest tracking data for global transit networks, when a nearby display chimes and Alan's ID flashes on the screen. Reflexive, still half-distracted by the globe at his fingertips, John picks up the call. His little brother's face flashes up on the screen, bright and cheerful. "Hiya, John!"

"Alan. How's your schoolwork going?"

"Taking a break!" Alan announces and even three hundred miles distant and two and a half years from home, John still knows his little brother well enough to know when he's playing at casual truancy. "Thought I'd say hi."

"Hi. You seem like you're taking a lot of breaks today."

"Pomodoros, Johnny! Keeps my brain sharp."

"They're meant to be twenty-five minutes _on_ , five minutes _off_ , you realize."

Alan laughs like this was a joke. It wasn't, but John lets the assumption slide. "How's it going?"

"Fine. Did you need my help with anything?"

"Oh, nah. No, not really. It's not hard stuff. S'just math."

"You take a lot of shortcuts with your math, let me look it over when you're done."

"You can look it over now!"

John also knows Alan well enough to know that this is a ploy, and he chuckles, shakes his head. "When you're done. This call has been a minute and a half long. Three and a half to go, I hope your brain is getting adequately sharpened."

Alan groans theatrically and flops dramatically over the kitchen table. "You are not fun. You are the least fun out of anybody I know."

"Did you want to talk about the weather?" John's fingers flicker over the surface of the globe, pull up Tracy Island's current conditions. "Ah. Fifteen degrees. Sunny. Wind from the southwest at 24km/h. Chance of showers later in the evening. Tomorrow's projected to be—"

"Johhhhhhhhn," Alan whines and then hesitates, doubt creeping into his tone, "I mean, if you don't wanna talk to me, that's fine, I just—"

Sometimes Alan's got a way of poking needles into John's conscience, though it's the last thing in the world John will ever let him know. "No, sorry. I mean, yes. I mean—sorry, Al, it's fine. Just distracted. We can talk."

"Oh, good!" Alan perks back up, pushes off the table to sit upright again. "We should talk more often."

"Mhm."

John's not really watching him, glancing out of the corner of his eye while he sets various algorithms and protocols to skim through global comm channels, waiting to ping off particular keywords, off the tones and frequencies that crop up in human speech when an operator is in distress. Maybe part of him notices how Alan seems to be looking at him a little more intently than usual, how his little brother's brow has furrowed, how he seems to be trying to work up the nerve to ask a question. He eats up a minute of his breaktime chewing his lip, and John's still only half listening when Alan asks, "Don't you ever get lonely up there, John?"

It's a keyword. It trips a subroutine, triggers a protocol that John's written into his heart, any time the word "lonely" gets used. There are a variety of responses immediately to hand.

 _Of course not. I talk to you all at least a dozen times a day, of course I'm not lonely._

 _Not really, no, I'm really too busy to be lonely._

 _No, Alan. I don't ever get lonely up here._

None of these work on Alan.

 _Lonely? Who told you to ask if I'm lonely?_

 _Lonely? What do you mean by lonely?_

 _Lonely? Where do you get the idea that I'm lonely?_

 _Lonely? Since when do I get lonely?_

 _Lonely? Why would I be lonely?_

 _Lonely? How could I be lonely?_

It takes a particular trick to fool Alan. Even then, John's never sure if he really does. It takes careful choreography, takes careful choice of tone and body language and that falsity of eye-contact, looking up at his little brother and pretending that he meets Alan's gaze as he says, light and easy, "Lonely? With so much going on around me?"

Alan's face screws up into profound doubt at this, and John's reminded of an eleven-year-old, lying on his stomach and kicking his feet, with nothing more to worry about than the plot of his Saturday morning cartoons. "But it's not really around you, it's more... _below_ you."

John glances earthward, impassive as he formulates his answer, an answer of rote and routine; a truth that's true because John needs it to be.

"Well," he says, "It feels like the right distance to me."

* * *

 _And this concludes vault_of_heaven! Thank you for reading. The seventh and final part of Heavenward is called **the_horizons_child,** and is currently running on my tumblr, tb5-heavenward. When complete, this will be published to in full. Thank you for reading 3_


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